Just shows what opportunity can bring for our nation's young people. -Dr. Louie F. Rodriguez
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High-quality High School Turns Former Gang Member Into Community Organizer
LOS ANGELES, Sept. 29 /PRNewswire-HISPANIC PR WIRE/ -- Ely Flores remembers the day when, at six years old, he first saw gunshots fly in his neighborhood as rival gang members fired back and forth. Growing up in South Central Los Angeles, where gangs and drugs dominated, presented many obstacles to success.
"My father left the family when I was young," Flores says. "That left my mom very sad and pushed my older brother and me into gangs.
"Eventually, Flores was kicked out of his local high school because of gang involvement. He was committed to house arrest several times. With regard to education, Flores experienced a situation familiar to many Latinos. Fewer than six in 10 Latino students in the U.S. graduate from high schools on time with a traditional diploma, and more than two in five drop out, according to an Education Week study.
But after enrolling at LA CAUSA YouthBuild in East Los Angeles -- an alternative school supported in part by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation --Flores envisioned a new future for himself.
LA CAUSA is one of 29 schools belonging to YouthBuild USA's National Schools Initiative, which brings alternative high school models to low-income students who had previously been dropouts. The program helps these students earn a high school diploma and prepare for college or the workforce.
Teachers in YouthBuild schools show students -- many of whom have been incarcerated or otherwise fell through the cracks -- that they can succeed despite their troubled pasts. Students enjoy small class sizes and supportive learning environments as well as leadership development training and career counseling. Students gain construction skills through hands-on learning while taking high school courses. In some cases, they can also earn early college credits.
For many students, the YouthBuild model is transformative.
"These schools and programs are trying some very interesting new things and are on the cutting edge of education," said Lissette Rodriguez, YouthBuild's vice president for field services. "Most people agree that youths who have dropped out deserve a chance. But it is more challenging for them to believe that these young people can achieve at a high level and go on to graduate from college.
"YouthBuild leaders are already proving that students who were cast off in the past can succeed. In the 2006-07 school year, roughly two out of three YouthBuild students either earned a high school diploma or received their general equivalency degree (GED). Four in 10 students were accepted into a college program.
Ely Flores was an early YouthBuild success story, graduating from LA CAUSA in 2005 with his high school diploma and GED.
"Ely was always a leader. He was just using his leadership for the wrong things," said Alejandro Covarrubias, who founded LA CAUSA YouthBuild in 2002. "He needed to see a model for positive behavior.
"After some rocky periods and with the school's help, Flores left his gang. Now 21 he is a young father, college student, and student mentor for students. Flores developed a passion for community organizing through LA CAUSA and now leads workshops for young people on leadership, youth empowerment, and human rights.
Turnarounds like Flores' are not uncommon in the hundreds of schools nationally that use grants from the Gates Foundation to transform the traditional high school. While each grantee takes a slightly different route, the foundation is most interested in smaller schools with high expectations and high-quality teaching.
The Gates Foundation and its partners are acutely concerned with the historically poor high school graduation rates and college attendance rates for Latino students. Since 2000, the foundation has invested more than $1.9 billion in more than 1,800 schools across the country.
Flores says experiences like his prove that high schools with fresh approaches can change the course of students' lives.
Flores wanted to show his newborn son a new way of life. But for years he was torn, feeling like leaving his gang would be the ultimate act of disloyalty. "LA CAUSA finally taught me what was really going on [with the gang]," Flores said. "And instead of just running with my friends, I began to tell myself that I could help my homies out by empowering them. I just realized there was something bigger in my life."
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Monday, September 22, 2008
With struggling economy, I.E. Latinos fear deportation (from San Bernardino Sun)
Story about home...-Dr. Louie F. Rodriguez
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With struggling economy, I.E. Latinos fear deportation
Stephen Wall, Staff Writer
Article Launched: 09/21/2008 06:56:36 PM PDT
SAN BERNARDINO - With U.S. financial markets tanking and the economy reeling, Latino activists fear a repeat of history.
During the Great Depression, one-third of the country's Mexican population was deported or pressured to return home. Many of them were American citizens.
The recession of the early 1950s forced nearly 3 million Mexicans to be sent home as a consequence of "Operation Wetback."
A similar economic and financial meltdown could precipitate another massive deportation and removal program, activists say.
"In times of recession and times of depression, there is an escalation and intensification of anti-immigration politics," said Armando Navarro, coordinator of the National Alliance for Human Rights. "Immigrants become the scapegoats."
The National Alliance has scheduled a meeting Tuesday at the Villasenor Library to discuss ways to counteract what it sees as a resurgence of nativism.
The meeting also will focus on the progress of local efforts in support of Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama. Several "Viva Obama" clubs recently formed to mobilize Latino voters to back Obama.
The Illinois senator is preferred by many Latinos who favor a path to citizenship for the country's estimated 12 million illegal immigrants.
Latino immigrant communities in several states have been hit hard by workplace raids and other enforcement measures that have created a climate of fear and anxiety.
In a well-publicized case, federal immigration agents in May arrested 389 workers during a raid at a meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa.
Closer to home, federal agents this month served a search warrant and arrested 51 illegal immigrants at a Palm Springs bakery. Two supervisors also were charged with employing illegal immigrants.
A Pew Hispanic Center survey released last week showed that a growing number of Latinos in the United States are worried about being deported. Fifty-seven percent said they are concerned that they, a relative or close friend may be deported. That's a 4 percent increase over last year, according to the survey.
"They're getting real strict with the law," said Jorge Reyes, a Fontana resident who is vice president of political affairs for the Ontario Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. "They are going to the factories and the companies and going after the workers. This is getting really bad for us."
Mel Albiso, who heads a statewide nonprofit that helps Latino students, said there is a correlation between workplace raids and school attendance.
"The immigrant parents will keep their children home because they're fearful of their families being split apart," said Albiso, president of the Association of Mexican-American Educators. "You can't educate children the way you need to when they're scared about having a place to go home to. No group of people should have to live in fear."
---------------------------------------------------------------------
With struggling economy, I.E. Latinos fear deportation
Stephen Wall, Staff Writer
Article Launched: 09/21/2008 06:56:36 PM PDT
SAN BERNARDINO - With U.S. financial markets tanking and the economy reeling, Latino activists fear a repeat of history.
During the Great Depression, one-third of the country's Mexican population was deported or pressured to return home. Many of them were American citizens.
The recession of the early 1950s forced nearly 3 million Mexicans to be sent home as a consequence of "Operation Wetback."
A similar economic and financial meltdown could precipitate another massive deportation and removal program, activists say.
"In times of recession and times of depression, there is an escalation and intensification of anti-immigration politics," said Armando Navarro, coordinator of the National Alliance for Human Rights. "Immigrants become the scapegoats."
The National Alliance has scheduled a meeting Tuesday at the Villasenor Library to discuss ways to counteract what it sees as a resurgence of nativism.
The meeting also will focus on the progress of local efforts in support of Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama. Several "Viva Obama" clubs recently formed to mobilize Latino voters to back Obama.
The Illinois senator is preferred by many Latinos who favor a path to citizenship for the country's estimated 12 million illegal immigrants.
Latino immigrant communities in several states have been hit hard by workplace raids and other enforcement measures that have created a climate of fear and anxiety.
In a well-publicized case, federal immigration agents in May arrested 389 workers during a raid at a meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa.
Closer to home, federal agents this month served a search warrant and arrested 51 illegal immigrants at a Palm Springs bakery. Two supervisors also were charged with employing illegal immigrants.
A Pew Hispanic Center survey released last week showed that a growing number of Latinos in the United States are worried about being deported. Fifty-seven percent said they are concerned that they, a relative or close friend may be deported. That's a 4 percent increase over last year, according to the survey.
"They're getting real strict with the law," said Jorge Reyes, a Fontana resident who is vice president of political affairs for the Ontario Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. "They are going to the factories and the companies and going after the workers. This is getting really bad for us."
Mel Albiso, who heads a statewide nonprofit that helps Latino students, said there is a correlation between workplace raids and school attendance.
"The immigrant parents will keep their children home because they're fearful of their families being split apart," said Albiso, president of the Association of Mexican-American Educators. "You can't educate children the way you need to when they're scared about having a place to go home to. No group of people should have to live in fear."
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Measure 58's goal of English-only classes already a reality (from The Oregonian)
Once the numbers of English Language Learners are at a level of "critical mass" in states with booming ELL populations, we should expect similar proposals to emerge, particularly in the South. Such proposals will probably be accompanied by ideas that are not based on research, driven by political purposes, and led by people who are the most removed from public education. -Dr. Louie F. Rodriguez
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Measure 58's goal of English-only classes already a reality
Posted by sroux September 20, 2008 21:27PM
Doug Beghtel / The Oregonian
Verenise Hernandez, a fourth-grader at Cornelius Elementary, practices reading in Spanish with help from teacher Marcia Camacho. Forest Grove educators say teaching Spanish-speaking students to read and write well in Spanish is the best way to help them become strong readers and writers of English.
Voters are being asked to decide how Oregon schools should teach nearly 70,000 students learning English as their second language.
Measure 58, one of five measures on the November ballot authored by Bill Sizemore, would prohibit schools from teaching English learners in their native language after one year in elementary school or two years in high school.
Sizemore wants to plunge them into all-English classrooms as soon as possible because, he says, schools intentionally delay getting students fluent in English.
His proposal, and the strong opposition it is generating among educators, spotlight how little most people know about the way the children spend their days in Oregon classrooms.
Roughly 85 percent are taught exclusively in English, without any teaching in their native Spanish, Russian, Somali or Vietnamese, an analysis by The Oregonian shows.
They rely on their teachers' gestures, pictures, diagrams and carefully enunciated English words to learn their new language and math, history, science and literature at the same time.
Oregon's English language learners
80% are in sheltered instruction, in which students learning English go to regular class with English-speaking classmates but the teacher uses extra visual clues, vocabulary lessons, etc.
8% are in short-term instruction in the first language, along with instruction in English, until the student gains basic literacy in the first language plus gains English skills. This is usually done in primary grades.
5% are in dual-language immersion programs, in which English-speaking students learn Spanish, Japanese or Mandarin, while native speakers of those languages learn English.
4% are in long-term instruction in native language and English so they become and stay bilingual. (This happens almost only in Woodburn and Canby.)
3% are in separate ESL classes taught exclusively in English.
Source: Oregon Department of Education
The rest of Oregon's English learners are taught part of the day in their native language, in either Spanish, Russian or Chinese.
Most are in classes exclusively for students learning English. But some, such as those in immersion magnet programs in Portland, are in classes designed to help both native English speakers and those learning English become bilingual.
The idea behind teaching English learners partly in their own language is twofold: Students learn to read and write faster when taught in their first language, and those literacy skills then transfer to English. During the years students are still shaky in English, they can learn meaty academic content in their native tongue.
A coalition that includes every major education group in the state is working to defeat Measure 58.
Schools agree that getting nonnative speakers proficient in English is the paramount goal for those students, says Diana Fernandez, director of English as a second language instruction for Portland Public Schools, where about 90 percent of English learners are taught only in English. She acknowledges that some students still languish with only intermediate English skills.
But the approach to teaching English should be based on research and on individual needs of students -- whether they can read and write in any language, for example, or whether they have a learning disability, says Wei-Wei Lou, director of English as a second language instruction in Beaverton schools.
Although it seems counterintuitive, teaching students to read and write in their first language, then transitioning them to English, leads to students who are the strongest at reading and writing English, says Perla Rodriguez, principal of Cornelius Elementary.
Research consistently finds that teaching students literacy in their own language makes them stronger readers of English, agrees Claude Goldenberg, a Stanford professor who directs the Center for Language Minority Education and Research.
A time limit, as would be set by Sizemore's measure, makes no sense, Beaverton's Lou says. "All children are very different. So if you say cap it at one year or cap it at two years, that's not appropriate."
Most-common approach
Unlike other states, such as California and Arizona, Oregon has never been a battleground over bilingual education, in part because the number of students not fluent in English was small.
That population has grown in the past decade, however, and now almost one of every eight students in Oregon is learning English as a second language.
Under federal law, all 68,000 English learners are guaranteed two things: They are entitled to special teaching in English to help them write, read and speak English, and they must be taught the same core academic content as native English speakers.
Oregon school districts have developed a host of different approaches to do that.
By far the most common is what's known as "sheltered instruction," which calls on teachers to use gestures, visual aids, repetition, simplified terms and other cues to teach math, social studies, writing and other subjects. There is no teaching in or translation to students' native language.
With 40 different languages sprinkled across hundreds of Oregon schools, it is impractical to teach each student in his or her native language.
Michael Lloyd / The OregonianWestview High teacher Brian Squire gives Abdi Somow, a refugee from Somalia, feedback on a writing assignment. Like most Oregon students learning English as their second language, Somow is taught exclusively in English with no teaching in or translation into his first language. Students who arrive in the United States as teenagers with little formal education in any language face a steep learning curve to master reading and writing English.
At Beaverton's Westview High, for example, Brian Squire's seventh-period class has 23 students who speak 11 different languages -- Cantonese, Somali, Hebrew, Russian, Mandarin, Japanese, German, Spanish, Taiwanese, Korean and Uzbek. Most of them are recent arrivals. The biggest group, Spanish speakers, make up one-third of the class.
The school cannot afford and could not find qualified teachers fluent in all those languages. So Westview groups students by their English level and gives them targeted help in English with biology, global studies and other subjects as well as English instruction.
Squires speaks slowly, gestures emphatically, rephrases and repeats his key messages and tries to tie new ideas in English to familiar ideas and details from students' home cultures.
"I can understand my teacher, just sometimes it's hard," says Alice Morgenva, who arrived from Uzbekistan six months ago after her family won a green card that allowed them to immigrate. "I know information, but to write in English, it's hard for me."
Dual-language instruction
School districts in Woodburn, Forest Grove and Salem-Keizer -- where at least 20 percent of the students speak Spanish as a first language -- together account for about 60 percent of all Oregon students who get taught in a language besides English for part of the day. How are students taught English in Oregon?
Exclusively in English: 85%
Part of the day in English, part of the day in their native language: 10%
In a dual-language immersion program, where some students learn their first language plus English, and native English speakers learn to become bilingual: 5%
Source: Oregon Department of Education
Other school districts, including Portland, Corvallis and Phoenix-Talent, offer popular immersion programs that allow native English speakers to gradually become bilingual in Spanish, Mandarin or Japanese -- and allow speakers of those languages to gradually learn English -- while they learn academic subjects in both languages. Woodburn has switched to that approach in primary grades and will move almost entirely to dual-language immersion one grade at a time.
In most Forest Grove elementary schools, students who speak Spanish at home are taught reading and writing in Spanish for 90 minutes a day, along with a 30-minute English language development class.
Once they have mastered reading and writing in their own language -- by fourth or fifth grade for those who start in kindergarten in Forest Grove -- they are put into an English reading and writing class.
Fourth-grader Alberto Acension came to Cornelius Elementary in second grade. Last week, he was taught in Spanish about techniques for strong, independent reading. "Leer a si mismo" ("to read on your own") read the chart he helped create. He read a biography of Cesar Chavez in Spanish.
Later that day, Alberto learned how to search for books in the school library, eagerly tracking the librarian's directions in English. He checked out a book about soccer, written in English.
"In my house, I already know how to speak Spanish," he says. "In my class, I speak English, too. It's fun."
Which language does he like to read in? "Both," he says.
Forest Grove students show strong results in English. More than half moved up a full level in English proficiency last year. By high school, 60 percent of Latino students read at grade level -- nearly the statewide average for all Oregon sophomores.
But Woodburn, which also teaches its students to read and write in their first language, posts poorer results. After five years getting help with English, only 13 percent of its students were proficient. Only about 40 percent of its Latino 10th-graders passed the state reading test.
That's why the district has switched its approach to be more like Forest Grove's, Superintendent Walt Bloomberg says. The district knows it must do better at getting students fully proficient in English.
Sizemore's reasoning
Sizemore says he got the idea for his ballot measure from a pair of teachers who told him their students were sidelined for years in classes for English learners when they could have done fine with regular all-English lessons.
Schools receive nearly $3,000 in additional money from the state for each student in English as a second language. Sizemore says many schools keep students in the program just to get the money.
"My message is that if you're going to come here, we want you to be successful, and you have to learn English, because it's the gateway to success," Sizemore says. "Instead, for the first two years here, we teach them to be proficient in Spanish or Laotian or whatever their language is. That's nonsense."
Educators say he is misinformed -- no Oregon students are taught in Laotian, for instance, and every English language learner is taught in English for part of every day.
Eduardo Lopez, a second-grader at Cornelius Elementary, is glad he gets to learn about animals and other second-grade subjects in two languages. It allows him to communicate with people who speak only Spanish, like his parents, and only English, like many of his schoolmates.
"That way you can understand and talk to them," he says.
-- Betsy Hammond; betsyhammond@news.oregonian.com
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Measure 58's goal of English-only classes already a reality
Posted by sroux September 20, 2008 21:27PM
Doug Beghtel / The Oregonian
Verenise Hernandez, a fourth-grader at Cornelius Elementary, practices reading in Spanish with help from teacher Marcia Camacho. Forest Grove educators say teaching Spanish-speaking students to read and write well in Spanish is the best way to help them become strong readers and writers of English.
Voters are being asked to decide how Oregon schools should teach nearly 70,000 students learning English as their second language.
Measure 58, one of five measures on the November ballot authored by Bill Sizemore, would prohibit schools from teaching English learners in their native language after one year in elementary school or two years in high school.
Sizemore wants to plunge them into all-English classrooms as soon as possible because, he says, schools intentionally delay getting students fluent in English.
His proposal, and the strong opposition it is generating among educators, spotlight how little most people know about the way the children spend their days in Oregon classrooms.
Roughly 85 percent are taught exclusively in English, without any teaching in their native Spanish, Russian, Somali or Vietnamese, an analysis by The Oregonian shows.
They rely on their teachers' gestures, pictures, diagrams and carefully enunciated English words to learn their new language and math, history, science and literature at the same time.
Oregon's English language learners
80% are in sheltered instruction, in which students learning English go to regular class with English-speaking classmates but the teacher uses extra visual clues, vocabulary lessons, etc.
8% are in short-term instruction in the first language, along with instruction in English, until the student gains basic literacy in the first language plus gains English skills. This is usually done in primary grades.
5% are in dual-language immersion programs, in which English-speaking students learn Spanish, Japanese or Mandarin, while native speakers of those languages learn English.
4% are in long-term instruction in native language and English so they become and stay bilingual. (This happens almost only in Woodburn and Canby.)
3% are in separate ESL classes taught exclusively in English.
Source: Oregon Department of Education
The rest of Oregon's English learners are taught part of the day in their native language, in either Spanish, Russian or Chinese.
Most are in classes exclusively for students learning English. But some, such as those in immersion magnet programs in Portland, are in classes designed to help both native English speakers and those learning English become bilingual.
The idea behind teaching English learners partly in their own language is twofold: Students learn to read and write faster when taught in their first language, and those literacy skills then transfer to English. During the years students are still shaky in English, they can learn meaty academic content in their native tongue.
A coalition that includes every major education group in the state is working to defeat Measure 58.
Schools agree that getting nonnative speakers proficient in English is the paramount goal for those students, says Diana Fernandez, director of English as a second language instruction for Portland Public Schools, where about 90 percent of English learners are taught only in English. She acknowledges that some students still languish with only intermediate English skills.
But the approach to teaching English should be based on research and on individual needs of students -- whether they can read and write in any language, for example, or whether they have a learning disability, says Wei-Wei Lou, director of English as a second language instruction in Beaverton schools.
Although it seems counterintuitive, teaching students to read and write in their first language, then transitioning them to English, leads to students who are the strongest at reading and writing English, says Perla Rodriguez, principal of Cornelius Elementary.
Research consistently finds that teaching students literacy in their own language makes them stronger readers of English, agrees Claude Goldenberg, a Stanford professor who directs the Center for Language Minority Education and Research.
A time limit, as would be set by Sizemore's measure, makes no sense, Beaverton's Lou says. "All children are very different. So if you say cap it at one year or cap it at two years, that's not appropriate."
Most-common approach
Unlike other states, such as California and Arizona, Oregon has never been a battleground over bilingual education, in part because the number of students not fluent in English was small.
That population has grown in the past decade, however, and now almost one of every eight students in Oregon is learning English as a second language.
Under federal law, all 68,000 English learners are guaranteed two things: They are entitled to special teaching in English to help them write, read and speak English, and they must be taught the same core academic content as native English speakers.
Oregon school districts have developed a host of different approaches to do that.
By far the most common is what's known as "sheltered instruction," which calls on teachers to use gestures, visual aids, repetition, simplified terms and other cues to teach math, social studies, writing and other subjects. There is no teaching in or translation to students' native language.
With 40 different languages sprinkled across hundreds of Oregon schools, it is impractical to teach each student in his or her native language.
Michael Lloyd / The OregonianWestview High teacher Brian Squire gives Abdi Somow, a refugee from Somalia, feedback on a writing assignment. Like most Oregon students learning English as their second language, Somow is taught exclusively in English with no teaching in or translation into his first language. Students who arrive in the United States as teenagers with little formal education in any language face a steep learning curve to master reading and writing English.
At Beaverton's Westview High, for example, Brian Squire's seventh-period class has 23 students who speak 11 different languages -- Cantonese, Somali, Hebrew, Russian, Mandarin, Japanese, German, Spanish, Taiwanese, Korean and Uzbek. Most of them are recent arrivals. The biggest group, Spanish speakers, make up one-third of the class.
The school cannot afford and could not find qualified teachers fluent in all those languages. So Westview groups students by their English level and gives them targeted help in English with biology, global studies and other subjects as well as English instruction.
Squires speaks slowly, gestures emphatically, rephrases and repeats his key messages and tries to tie new ideas in English to familiar ideas and details from students' home cultures.
"I can understand my teacher, just sometimes it's hard," says Alice Morgenva, who arrived from Uzbekistan six months ago after her family won a green card that allowed them to immigrate. "I know information, but to write in English, it's hard for me."
Dual-language instruction
School districts in Woodburn, Forest Grove and Salem-Keizer -- where at least 20 percent of the students speak Spanish as a first language -- together account for about 60 percent of all Oregon students who get taught in a language besides English for part of the day. How are students taught English in Oregon?
Exclusively in English: 85%
Part of the day in English, part of the day in their native language: 10%
In a dual-language immersion program, where some students learn their first language plus English, and native English speakers learn to become bilingual: 5%
Source: Oregon Department of Education
Other school districts, including Portland, Corvallis and Phoenix-Talent, offer popular immersion programs that allow native English speakers to gradually become bilingual in Spanish, Mandarin or Japanese -- and allow speakers of those languages to gradually learn English -- while they learn academic subjects in both languages. Woodburn has switched to that approach in primary grades and will move almost entirely to dual-language immersion one grade at a time.
In most Forest Grove elementary schools, students who speak Spanish at home are taught reading and writing in Spanish for 90 minutes a day, along with a 30-minute English language development class.
Once they have mastered reading and writing in their own language -- by fourth or fifth grade for those who start in kindergarten in Forest Grove -- they are put into an English reading and writing class.
Fourth-grader Alberto Acension came to Cornelius Elementary in second grade. Last week, he was taught in Spanish about techniques for strong, independent reading. "Leer a si mismo" ("to read on your own") read the chart he helped create. He read a biography of Cesar Chavez in Spanish.
Later that day, Alberto learned how to search for books in the school library, eagerly tracking the librarian's directions in English. He checked out a book about soccer, written in English.
"In my house, I already know how to speak Spanish," he says. "In my class, I speak English, too. It's fun."
Which language does he like to read in? "Both," he says.
Forest Grove students show strong results in English. More than half moved up a full level in English proficiency last year. By high school, 60 percent of Latino students read at grade level -- nearly the statewide average for all Oregon sophomores.
But Woodburn, which also teaches its students to read and write in their first language, posts poorer results. After five years getting help with English, only 13 percent of its students were proficient. Only about 40 percent of its Latino 10th-graders passed the state reading test.
That's why the district has switched its approach to be more like Forest Grove's, Superintendent Walt Bloomberg says. The district knows it must do better at getting students fully proficient in English.
Sizemore's reasoning
Sizemore says he got the idea for his ballot measure from a pair of teachers who told him their students were sidelined for years in classes for English learners when they could have done fine with regular all-English lessons.
Schools receive nearly $3,000 in additional money from the state for each student in English as a second language. Sizemore says many schools keep students in the program just to get the money.
"My message is that if you're going to come here, we want you to be successful, and you have to learn English, because it's the gateway to success," Sizemore says. "Instead, for the first two years here, we teach them to be proficient in Spanish or Laotian or whatever their language is. That's nonsense."
Educators say he is misinformed -- no Oregon students are taught in Laotian, for instance, and every English language learner is taught in English for part of every day.
Eduardo Lopez, a second-grader at Cornelius Elementary, is glad he gets to learn about animals and other second-grade subjects in two languages. It allows him to communicate with people who speak only Spanish, like his parents, and only English, like many of his schoolmates.
"That way you can understand and talk to them," he says.
-- Betsy Hammond; betsyhammond@news.oregonian.com
Study: Many 8th-graders can't handle algebra (from USA Today)
Study: Many 8th-graders can't handle algebra
By Greg Toppo, USA TODAY
Peering beneath the hood of a national push to have all students take algebra by eighth grade, a new study out today finds that many of the nation's lowest-performing middle-schoolers are in way over their heads. They take algebra and other advanced math courses before they've mastered basic skills such as multiplication, division and problem-solving with fractions.
For more than a decade, "algebra for everyone" has been a high-minded mantra for the idea that virtually all students should take algebra by eighth grade. Since the mid-1990s, schools nationwide have pushed more and more students into challenging middle-school math courses. Last year, 38% of eighth-graders were enrolled in advanced math (Algebra I, Algebra II or Geometry).
But when Brookings Institution researcher Tom Loveless looked at the skills of eighth-graders taking advanced math, he found something startling: Between 2000 and 2005, the percentage of very low-performing students in advanced math classes more than tripled.
Using data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, he found that among the lowest-scoring 10% of kids, nearly 29% were taking advanced math, despite having very low skills.
How low? On par with a typical second-grader's, Loveless says. They lack a solid foundation in multiplication, division, fractions, decimals, rounding or place value. Yet they were tackling fairly sophisticated math.
"It's hard to teach a real algebra class if you have kids who don't know arithmetic," he says.
University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher Adam Gamoran, who has advocated pushing more low-achieving high schoolers into algebra classes, says these students get more from algebra classes than from general math classes. "In their zeal to extend this reform ever more broadly, some mistakes have been made," he says, but he hopes the findings don't cause a backlash against challenging low achievers to do harder math.
Loveless, who directs Brookings' Brown Center on Education Policy, estimates about 120,000 kids are inappropriately enrolled in classes that are supposed to level the playing field and too often don't. "It's really counterfeit equity," he says, noting that the mismatch inordinately affects black, Hispanic and poor kids in urban schools.
Gamoran says algebra concepts "should be introduced earlier in students' mathematical studies — it's not like there should be no algebra and then, in eighth grade, all algebra."
Loveless agrees. But he says for kids who don't have adequate skills in eighth grade, schools should hold off on placing them in algebra until high school.
By Greg Toppo, USA TODAY
Peering beneath the hood of a national push to have all students take algebra by eighth grade, a new study out today finds that many of the nation's lowest-performing middle-schoolers are in way over their heads. They take algebra and other advanced math courses before they've mastered basic skills such as multiplication, division and problem-solving with fractions.
For more than a decade, "algebra for everyone" has been a high-minded mantra for the idea that virtually all students should take algebra by eighth grade. Since the mid-1990s, schools nationwide have pushed more and more students into challenging middle-school math courses. Last year, 38% of eighth-graders were enrolled in advanced math (Algebra I, Algebra II or Geometry).
But when Brookings Institution researcher Tom Loveless looked at the skills of eighth-graders taking advanced math, he found something startling: Between 2000 and 2005, the percentage of very low-performing students in advanced math classes more than tripled.
Using data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, he found that among the lowest-scoring 10% of kids, nearly 29% were taking advanced math, despite having very low skills.
How low? On par with a typical second-grader's, Loveless says. They lack a solid foundation in multiplication, division, fractions, decimals, rounding or place value. Yet they were tackling fairly sophisticated math.
"It's hard to teach a real algebra class if you have kids who don't know arithmetic," he says.
University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher Adam Gamoran, who has advocated pushing more low-achieving high schoolers into algebra classes, says these students get more from algebra classes than from general math classes. "In their zeal to extend this reform ever more broadly, some mistakes have been made," he says, but he hopes the findings don't cause a backlash against challenging low achievers to do harder math.
Loveless, who directs Brookings' Brown Center on Education Policy, estimates about 120,000 kids are inappropriately enrolled in classes that are supposed to level the playing field and too often don't. "It's really counterfeit equity," he says, noting that the mismatch inordinately affects black, Hispanic and poor kids in urban schools.
Gamoran says algebra concepts "should be introduced earlier in students' mathematical studies — it's not like there should be no algebra and then, in eighth grade, all algebra."
Loveless agrees. But he says for kids who don't have adequate skills in eighth grade, schools should hold off on placing them in algebra until high school.
Friday, September 19, 2008
Hispanic immigrant college students impacted by court ruling
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Hispanic immigrant college students impacted by court ruling
MALDEF URGES CALIFORNIA SUPREME COURT REVIEW OF IN-STATE TUITION RULING
AB 540 Still Remains in Effect Pending Final Resolution
Press Release
LOS ANGELES, CA - Yesterday, a California Appellate Court issued a ruling that calls into question the continued validity of California’s AB 540. AB 540 is a California law which provides a waiver of the out-of-state tuition fees at California’s public colleges and universities for any student – regardless of immigration status – who has completed three years at a California high school and has attained a high school diploma.
Specifically, the Court of Appeal held that under AB 540 eligibility for in-state tuition is based on residency and therefore violates federal law. The Court so ruled despite the fact that eligibility is based on attending a California high school and receiving a high school diploma, criteria that are unrelated to residency. The case likely will be resolved through an appeal to the California Supreme Court.
“Yesterday’s appellate decision must not close the door to higher education for undocumented immigrant students in California. They are graduates of our public schools and they, and their parents, have paid taxes to the state. California needs them for our future and ignoring their California ties makes us all poorer,” said MALDEF Western Regional Counsel Nancy Ramirez.
AB 540 remains in effect, and will likely continue to remain in effect until there is a final resolution of the case. In the meantime, students who are eligible should continue to receive the tuition waiver. If AB 540 is ultimately overturned, undocumented students who would have been eligible for the AB 540 tuition waiver will still be allowed to attend California public colleges and universities but will be required to pay out-of-state rather than in-state tuition.
The decision is yet another reason for the next President and Congress to fulfill their constitutional authority by enacting comprehensive immigration reform. Many of these students and their parents work in the most dangerous and difficult jobs in our state and country. Their hard work and aspirations for higher education can not be ignored.
“We will continue this fight in the California Supreme Court, if need be. Current AB 540 students, the vast majority of whom are United States citizens, must not be discouraged. Their place in college remains intact,” said Cynthia Valenzuela, MALDEF’s Director of Litigation.
MALDEF sought to intervene at the trial level and filed an amicus brief with the appellate court. MALDEF will work with legislators, state officials, students and the community to permit AB 540 students to remain and pay in-state tuition.
Founded in 1968, MALDEF, the nation’s leading Latino legal civil rights organization, promotes and protects the rights of Latinos through litigation, advocacy, community education and outreach, leadership development, and higher education scholarships. For more information on MALDEF, please visit: http://www.maldef.org/.
Hispanic immigrant college students impacted by court ruling
MALDEF URGES CALIFORNIA SUPREME COURT REVIEW OF IN-STATE TUITION RULING
AB 540 Still Remains in Effect Pending Final Resolution
Press Release
LOS ANGELES, CA - Yesterday, a California Appellate Court issued a ruling that calls into question the continued validity of California’s AB 540. AB 540 is a California law which provides a waiver of the out-of-state tuition fees at California’s public colleges and universities for any student – regardless of immigration status – who has completed three years at a California high school and has attained a high school diploma.
Specifically, the Court of Appeal held that under AB 540 eligibility for in-state tuition is based on residency and therefore violates federal law. The Court so ruled despite the fact that eligibility is based on attending a California high school and receiving a high school diploma, criteria that are unrelated to residency. The case likely will be resolved through an appeal to the California Supreme Court.
“Yesterday’s appellate decision must not close the door to higher education for undocumented immigrant students in California. They are graduates of our public schools and they, and their parents, have paid taxes to the state. California needs them for our future and ignoring their California ties makes us all poorer,” said MALDEF Western Regional Counsel Nancy Ramirez.
AB 540 remains in effect, and will likely continue to remain in effect until there is a final resolution of the case. In the meantime, students who are eligible should continue to receive the tuition waiver. If AB 540 is ultimately overturned, undocumented students who would have been eligible for the AB 540 tuition waiver will still be allowed to attend California public colleges and universities but will be required to pay out-of-state rather than in-state tuition.
The decision is yet another reason for the next President and Congress to fulfill their constitutional authority by enacting comprehensive immigration reform. Many of these students and their parents work in the most dangerous and difficult jobs in our state and country. Their hard work and aspirations for higher education can not be ignored.
“We will continue this fight in the California Supreme Court, if need be. Current AB 540 students, the vast majority of whom are United States citizens, must not be discouraged. Their place in college remains intact,” said Cynthia Valenzuela, MALDEF’s Director of Litigation.
MALDEF sought to intervene at the trial level and filed an amicus brief with the appellate court. MALDEF will work with legislators, state officials, students and the community to permit AB 540 students to remain and pay in-state tuition.
Founded in 1968, MALDEF, the nation’s leading Latino legal civil rights organization, promotes and protects the rights of Latinos through litigation, advocacy, community education and outreach, leadership development, and higher education scholarships. For more information on MALDEF, please visit: http://www.maldef.org/.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Summit links state, a half-million Hispanics (from Associated Press)
Recognizing the Latino presence in the mid-Atlantic area. -Dr. Louie F. Rodriguez
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Summit links state, a half-million Hispanics
By the Associated Press
September 19, 2008
CHESTER, Va. - Gov. Tim Kaine is scheduled to deliver remarks to about 300 people attending the 2008 Virginia Latino summit.
The gathering Friday at John Tyler Community College in Chester is sponsored by the Virginia Latino Advisory Board.
The summit is intended to provide information about state services and resources to those who serve Latinos in education, health, human resources, public safety and commerce.
Approximately 508,000 Hispanics live in Virginia.
Then-Gov. Mark R. Warner created the Virginia Latino Advisory Commission in 2003. The commission was made into the permanent Virginia Latino Advisory Board in 2005.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Summit links state, a half-million Hispanics
By the Associated Press
September 19, 2008
CHESTER, Va. - Gov. Tim Kaine is scheduled to deliver remarks to about 300 people attending the 2008 Virginia Latino summit.
The gathering Friday at John Tyler Community College in Chester is sponsored by the Virginia Latino Advisory Board.
The summit is intended to provide information about state services and resources to those who serve Latinos in education, health, human resources, public safety and commerce.
Approximately 508,000 Hispanics live in Virginia.
Then-Gov. Mark R. Warner created the Virginia Latino Advisory Commission in 2003. The commission was made into the permanent Virginia Latino Advisory Board in 2005.
Report finds Latinos gloomy over economy (from The Desert Sun)
Interesting findings as the presidential election approaches. -Dr. Louie F. Rodriguez
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Desert Sun
September 18, 2008
Report finds Latinos gloomy over economy
Nicole C. Brambila
The Desert Sun
One in two Latinos say their situation is worse now than a year ago, according to a poll released today.
The news comes on the heels of multi-billion government bailouts, low consumer confidence and an increasingly shaky Wall Street.
In 2007, just 42 percent of all Latinos said their situation had worsened, according to the poll conducted by the Pew Hispanic Center.
Among the report’s findings:
• 15 percent say that finding and keeping a job is difficult because they are Latino
• 81 percent say immigration enforcement should be done by the federal government, not local law enforcement.
• 76 percent disapprove of workplace raids and 70 percent disapprove of criminal prosecution for employers who hire undocumented workers.
• 10 percent say police and other authorities have stopped them and asked about their immigration status.
• The majority of Latinos worry about deportation, 57 percent.
The poll of 2,015 Latinos – 44 percent of who report they are registered to vote – was conducted June 9 through July 13.
This gloomy outlook is most prevalent among immigrants, 63 percent of whom say their situation has worsened in the past year as the down turn in the economy and rising unemployment has hit Latinos especially hard and the federal government steps up enforcement.
Founded in 2001, the Pew Hispanic Center conducts research on Latinos and their impact in the United States to foster education. The Center does not take policy positions.
To read the full report, go to www.pewhispanic.org.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Desert Sun
September 18, 2008
Report finds Latinos gloomy over economy
Nicole C. Brambila
The Desert Sun
One in two Latinos say their situation is worse now than a year ago, according to a poll released today.
The news comes on the heels of multi-billion government bailouts, low consumer confidence and an increasingly shaky Wall Street.
In 2007, just 42 percent of all Latinos said their situation had worsened, according to the poll conducted by the Pew Hispanic Center.
Among the report’s findings:
• 15 percent say that finding and keeping a job is difficult because they are Latino
• 81 percent say immigration enforcement should be done by the federal government, not local law enforcement.
• 76 percent disapprove of workplace raids and 70 percent disapprove of criminal prosecution for employers who hire undocumented workers.
• 10 percent say police and other authorities have stopped them and asked about their immigration status.
• The majority of Latinos worry about deportation, 57 percent.
The poll of 2,015 Latinos – 44 percent of who report they are registered to vote – was conducted June 9 through July 13.
This gloomy outlook is most prevalent among immigrants, 63 percent of whom say their situation has worsened in the past year as the down turn in the economy and rising unemployment has hit Latinos especially hard and the federal government steps up enforcement.
Founded in 2001, the Pew Hispanic Center conducts research on Latinos and their impact in the United States to foster education. The Center does not take policy positions.
To read the full report, go to www.pewhispanic.org.
Report: Nev. should add funds for English learners (from Associated Press)
Notice how Las Vegas has been transformed over the last decade. -Dr. Louie F. Rodriguez
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Report: Nev. should add funds for English learners
The Associated Press
LAS VEGAS
A new report says Nevada isn't investing enough in instruction for English-language learners to meet the changing needs of a growing number of students.
The report, called "Gambling on the Future: Managing the Education Challenges of Rapid Growth in Nevada," says a lack of funding and resources for English learners jeopardizes Nevada's economic future.
The Washington, D.C.-based Migration Policy Institute's National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy compiled the report. MPI is a nonpartisan, nonprofit think tank that studies the movement of people worldwide.
The report says Nevada's immigrant population increased 50 percent between 2000 and 2006, and English-language learners compose about 15 percent of the state's students.
A Clark County School District official says the numbers are higher in the Las Vegas-based district, where more than 62,000 of the district's 300,000 students are English-language learners.
___
Information from: Las Vegas Review-Journal, http://www.lvrj.com
Published: Wednesday, September 17, 2008 09:39 PDT
© 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Report: Nev. should add funds for English learners
The Associated Press
LAS VEGAS
A new report says Nevada isn't investing enough in instruction for English-language learners to meet the changing needs of a growing number of students.
The report, called "Gambling on the Future: Managing the Education Challenges of Rapid Growth in Nevada," says a lack of funding and resources for English learners jeopardizes Nevada's economic future.
The Washington, D.C.-based Migration Policy Institute's National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy compiled the report. MPI is a nonpartisan, nonprofit think tank that studies the movement of people worldwide.
The report says Nevada's immigrant population increased 50 percent between 2000 and 2006, and English-language learners compose about 15 percent of the state's students.
A Clark County School District official says the numbers are higher in the Las Vegas-based district, where more than 62,000 of the district's 300,000 students are English-language learners.
___
Information from: Las Vegas Review-Journal, http://www.lvrj.com
Published: Wednesday, September 17, 2008 09:39 PDT
© 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Returning Dropouts Said to Face Too Tough a Road to Graduation (from Ed Week)
Once again the significance of relationships rings true as a glue between students and school. Yet, our system continues to focus on the structural approaches to school reform. As I stated in my book, Small School and Urban Youth, relationships may be part of the silver bullet.
Also, with regard to the article below, the report's authors speculated that the reason why Latinos are less likely to re-enroll is related to the proximity to Mexico and their back-and-forth travel. Well, I'm from San Bernardino and I know for a fact that most students are 3rd, 4th, and 5th generation Chicanos from the area. Their mobility to Mexico is less likely, in my opinion, and I would say that it probably has more to do with housing, job instability for parents and students, health-related factors, and possibly the overrepresentation of these students caught up in the juvenile justice system. -Dr. Louie F. Rodriguez
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Education Week
Returning Dropouts Said to Face Too Tough a Road to Graduation
By Debra Viadero
In the research on dropouts, the experiences of students like Robert Ortega, an 18-year-old senior at San Bernardino High School in California who dropped out of high school and re-enrolled twice, were once an invisible piece of the puzzle.
That’s because most studies on dropouts tend to focus on their numbers and what causes them to give up on school. A study released last week by researchers from WestEd, a San Francisco-based research group, takes a different tack, shedding a spotlight on the students who come back.
The study examines what happens to high school dropouts when they return to their studies, whether they graduate on the second, third, or fourth try, and the systemic disincentives that conspire to keep them out of the classroom.
“These are truly resilient, remarkable people,” said BethAnn Berliner, a senior research associate at WestEd and the study’s lead author. “And large urban districts with high rates of low-income families and high rates of retries are confronted with lots of disincentives to re-enrolling them.”
For their study, which was conducted for a federal regional education laboratory that WestEd runs, Ms. Berliner and her colleagues tracked 3,856 students from fall 2001, when they entered 9th grade in San Bernardino city schools for the first time, until 2006, when most had finished high school.
Even though the study focused on San Bernardino, a 59,000-student district south of Los Angeles that has drawn negative publicity for its high dropout rates, the findings have implications for many districts nationwide, experts said.
“I expect there are some differences among districts, but, by and large, these conditions exist in a lot of schools,” said Thomas Timar, a professor of education policy at the University of California, Davis, and the director of the university’s Center for Applied Policy in Education. “Trying to find ways of making it easier for students to re-enter school is probably not something that people have the time and inclination to do,” added Mr. Timar, who was not part of the WestEd study.
Out and In
Of the students the study tracked, more than a third—1,352 students—dropped out of school at least once over the five years of the study period. Yet for a sizeable proportion of those students, as for Mr. Ortega, dropping out was not a permanent condition.
Thirty-one percent of the dropouts, or 419 students, re-enrolled at some point. In the end, though, only 77 of the repeat students went on to graduate within five years.
The researchers also found that 15.5 percent of the returning students came back more than once. Fourteen percent of the returning students—59 students—re-enrolled twice and six students made three tries for their diploma.
“But our data underrepresents the problem,” added Ms. Berliner. “The students’ perception was that they had dropped out and come back more times than showed up on legitimate paper.”
For More Info
For background, previous stories, and Web links, read DropoutsThe study also found that, compared with African-American students, Hispanic students were more likely to drop out and less likely to re-enroll, possibly because many such students in San Bernardino often move back and forth between the United States and Mexico, where researchers are unable to track them. White students and Asian-American students, who had lower dropout rates to begin with, also re-enrolled at lower rates than black students.
The students who dropped out did so for all the typical reasons, including family problems, mounting course failures, poor academic skills, homelessness, and the lure of gang life, according to the study, which drew on interviews with students and teachers as well as district statistics. The researchers found that a similar set of factors push and pull students back to school.
“The primary push was that there was no place in the economy for a teenager without a high school diploma,” Ms. Berliner said. “The primary pull was a caring adult—for the most part, principals and coaches—who understood students’ life story and said, ‘Come back, we’ll do whatever it takes to get you back in school.’ ”
In Mr. Ortega’s case, as with many students, family responsibilities also played a leading role in leaving. Mr. Ortega left school in his sophomore year after his mother became fatally ill. Faced with having to take care of her, raise his three nephews, and earn enough money to support the family, the teenager felt he had no choice but to drop out.
Trying Again
While many dropouts from a large California district never returned, a substantial slice of them re-enrolled at least once. Nearly 85 percent of those re-enrollees did not manage to graduate, however.
SOURCE: WestEdHe re-enrolled last November after his mother died and his estranged sister took the family in.
“I always promised my grandfather that I would finish high school one way or another,” he said in an interview. “It blew my mind, finding out that the school was able to set me back in and get me the chances I need to finish.”
Aware of his personal problems, school officials arranged Mr. Ortega’s schedule so that he could take core academic classes early in the morning and then leave school in time to be home when his younger nephews returned from school.
Dearth of Options
In that respect, Mr. Ortega may be luckier than some of the re-enrollees who preceded him. At the time of the study, none of the district’s five traditional high schools had programs in place to help students recover credit for missed or failed courses, which was found to be a major reason that students drop out a second and third time.
Returning students, for the most part, were treated like any other student, the report found, sometimes returning to the same classes that they had already failed once.
Flexible scheduling, self-paced study, and credit-recovery programs are options at the district’s two “continuation schools,” which is what California calls alternative schools specifically aimed at troubled students. But in San Bernardino, the wait to get into those schools can be as long as a year.
Also, students don’t become eligible for some of the accelerated credit-recovery programs at the continuation school, or for adult education programs, until they are 16 or older, according to the report.
The problem is that 60 percent of the students who come back dropped out in their freshman year, when they were typically 14 or 15, according to the study.
And neither students nor educators view district summer school programs, which are geared to helping students pass state exams, as a good way to earn back credit.
“There needs to be some way to retrieve credits quickly so students don’t fall so far behind, feel hopeless, and drop out,” Ms. Berliner said. One result of the lack of options: A third of re-enrollees leave school before earning even one class credit, the study found.
San Bernardino school officials, for their part, have long put a high priority on luring dropouts back to school. Two years ago, for instance, the district began a twice-a-year campaign to recover errant students, sending staff members to knock on the doors of as many as 700 who hadn’t been showing up for class. The district also offers a middle college high school, Internet-based courses, a fifth-year schooling option, and programs for pregnant and parenting students to keep them on track to graduate.
Built-In Barriers
But school officials and researchers said educators also get penalized for re-enrolling dropouts because of built-in disincentives in the state and federal school systems.
“Under No Child Left Behind, a teacher has to be focused on raising test scores,” said Arturo Delgado, the district superintendent, referring to the far-reaching federal law on K-12 education. “That teacher may not feel very rewarded when we show up and say, ‘Congratulations, here are five or six students who’ve been out the last six months,’ because that student might drag down test scores."
What’s more, under state accountability rules, districts “get dinged,” as Ms. Berliner puts it, for graduating students in five years, rather than the usual four, and dropouts who re-enroll and then drop out again are counted as two separate dropouts. “Then the school gets labeled a dropout factory,” said Mr. Delgado, “and people lose confidence in the system.”
The report also suggests that, because the returning students often have sporadic attendance and take longer to graduate, districts lose out under the state’s school finance system, which calculates per-pupil funding based on a district’s average daily attendance over the course of the previous school year.
Russell W. Rumberger, a professor of education policy at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the director of the California Dropout Research Project, said the WestEd study is among a growing number of much-needed longitudinal studies tracking actual dropout patterns among high school students rather than relying on statistical calculations.
He said all the studies underscore the importance of 9th grade as the make-or-break year, and of accumulating course failures as a key trigger in students’ decision to leave school. “The kids with less course failures are the kids who re-enroll,” he noted.
Vol. 28, Issue 01, Pages 12-13
Back to Top
September 18, 2008 |Receive RSS
Advertisement
Related Stories
“Tackling the Dropout Crisis Comprehensively,” June 5, 2008.
“Project Aims to Tackle Dropout Problem, California-Style,” April 30, 2008.
“Dropout Campaigns Envisioned for States, 50 Key City Districts,” April 9, 2008.
Advertisement
© 2008 Editorial Projects in Education
About Us | Subscriptions | Site Licenses | Recruitment Advertising | Display Advertising | Policies | Help/FAQ | Contact us EW Archive
Also, with regard to the article below, the report's authors speculated that the reason why Latinos are less likely to re-enroll is related to the proximity to Mexico and their back-and-forth travel. Well, I'm from San Bernardino and I know for a fact that most students are 3rd, 4th, and 5th generation Chicanos from the area. Their mobility to Mexico is less likely, in my opinion, and I would say that it probably has more to do with housing, job instability for parents and students, health-related factors, and possibly the overrepresentation of these students caught up in the juvenile justice system. -Dr. Louie F. Rodriguez
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Education Week
Returning Dropouts Said to Face Too Tough a Road to Graduation
By Debra Viadero
In the research on dropouts, the experiences of students like Robert Ortega, an 18-year-old senior at San Bernardino High School in California who dropped out of high school and re-enrolled twice, were once an invisible piece of the puzzle.
That’s because most studies on dropouts tend to focus on their numbers and what causes them to give up on school. A study released last week by researchers from WestEd, a San Francisco-based research group, takes a different tack, shedding a spotlight on the students who come back.
The study examines what happens to high school dropouts when they return to their studies, whether they graduate on the second, third, or fourth try, and the systemic disincentives that conspire to keep them out of the classroom.
“These are truly resilient, remarkable people,” said BethAnn Berliner, a senior research associate at WestEd and the study’s lead author. “And large urban districts with high rates of low-income families and high rates of retries are confronted with lots of disincentives to re-enrolling them.”
For their study, which was conducted for a federal regional education laboratory that WestEd runs, Ms. Berliner and her colleagues tracked 3,856 students from fall 2001, when they entered 9th grade in San Bernardino city schools for the first time, until 2006, when most had finished high school.
Even though the study focused on San Bernardino, a 59,000-student district south of Los Angeles that has drawn negative publicity for its high dropout rates, the findings have implications for many districts nationwide, experts said.
“I expect there are some differences among districts, but, by and large, these conditions exist in a lot of schools,” said Thomas Timar, a professor of education policy at the University of California, Davis, and the director of the university’s Center for Applied Policy in Education. “Trying to find ways of making it easier for students to re-enter school is probably not something that people have the time and inclination to do,” added Mr. Timar, who was not part of the WestEd study.
Out and In
Of the students the study tracked, more than a third—1,352 students—dropped out of school at least once over the five years of the study period. Yet for a sizeable proportion of those students, as for Mr. Ortega, dropping out was not a permanent condition.
Thirty-one percent of the dropouts, or 419 students, re-enrolled at some point. In the end, though, only 77 of the repeat students went on to graduate within five years.
The researchers also found that 15.5 percent of the returning students came back more than once. Fourteen percent of the returning students—59 students—re-enrolled twice and six students made three tries for their diploma.
“But our data underrepresents the problem,” added Ms. Berliner. “The students’ perception was that they had dropped out and come back more times than showed up on legitimate paper.”
For More Info
For background, previous stories, and Web links, read DropoutsThe study also found that, compared with African-American students, Hispanic students were more likely to drop out and less likely to re-enroll, possibly because many such students in San Bernardino often move back and forth between the United States and Mexico, where researchers are unable to track them. White students and Asian-American students, who had lower dropout rates to begin with, also re-enrolled at lower rates than black students.
The students who dropped out did so for all the typical reasons, including family problems, mounting course failures, poor academic skills, homelessness, and the lure of gang life, according to the study, which drew on interviews with students and teachers as well as district statistics. The researchers found that a similar set of factors push and pull students back to school.
“The primary push was that there was no place in the economy for a teenager without a high school diploma,” Ms. Berliner said. “The primary pull was a caring adult—for the most part, principals and coaches—who understood students’ life story and said, ‘Come back, we’ll do whatever it takes to get you back in school.’ ”
In Mr. Ortega’s case, as with many students, family responsibilities also played a leading role in leaving. Mr. Ortega left school in his sophomore year after his mother became fatally ill. Faced with having to take care of her, raise his three nephews, and earn enough money to support the family, the teenager felt he had no choice but to drop out.
Trying Again
While many dropouts from a large California district never returned, a substantial slice of them re-enrolled at least once. Nearly 85 percent of those re-enrollees did not manage to graduate, however.
SOURCE: WestEdHe re-enrolled last November after his mother died and his estranged sister took the family in.
“I always promised my grandfather that I would finish high school one way or another,” he said in an interview. “It blew my mind, finding out that the school was able to set me back in and get me the chances I need to finish.”
Aware of his personal problems, school officials arranged Mr. Ortega’s schedule so that he could take core academic classes early in the morning and then leave school in time to be home when his younger nephews returned from school.
Dearth of Options
In that respect, Mr. Ortega may be luckier than some of the re-enrollees who preceded him. At the time of the study, none of the district’s five traditional high schools had programs in place to help students recover credit for missed or failed courses, which was found to be a major reason that students drop out a second and third time.
Returning students, for the most part, were treated like any other student, the report found, sometimes returning to the same classes that they had already failed once.
Flexible scheduling, self-paced study, and credit-recovery programs are options at the district’s two “continuation schools,” which is what California calls alternative schools specifically aimed at troubled students. But in San Bernardino, the wait to get into those schools can be as long as a year.
Also, students don’t become eligible for some of the accelerated credit-recovery programs at the continuation school, or for adult education programs, until they are 16 or older, according to the report.
The problem is that 60 percent of the students who come back dropped out in their freshman year, when they were typically 14 or 15, according to the study.
And neither students nor educators view district summer school programs, which are geared to helping students pass state exams, as a good way to earn back credit.
“There needs to be some way to retrieve credits quickly so students don’t fall so far behind, feel hopeless, and drop out,” Ms. Berliner said. One result of the lack of options: A third of re-enrollees leave school before earning even one class credit, the study found.
San Bernardino school officials, for their part, have long put a high priority on luring dropouts back to school. Two years ago, for instance, the district began a twice-a-year campaign to recover errant students, sending staff members to knock on the doors of as many as 700 who hadn’t been showing up for class. The district also offers a middle college high school, Internet-based courses, a fifth-year schooling option, and programs for pregnant and parenting students to keep them on track to graduate.
Built-In Barriers
But school officials and researchers said educators also get penalized for re-enrolling dropouts because of built-in disincentives in the state and federal school systems.
“Under No Child Left Behind, a teacher has to be focused on raising test scores,” said Arturo Delgado, the district superintendent, referring to the far-reaching federal law on K-12 education. “That teacher may not feel very rewarded when we show up and say, ‘Congratulations, here are five or six students who’ve been out the last six months,’ because that student might drag down test scores."
What’s more, under state accountability rules, districts “get dinged,” as Ms. Berliner puts it, for graduating students in five years, rather than the usual four, and dropouts who re-enroll and then drop out again are counted as two separate dropouts. “Then the school gets labeled a dropout factory,” said Mr. Delgado, “and people lose confidence in the system.”
The report also suggests that, because the returning students often have sporadic attendance and take longer to graduate, districts lose out under the state’s school finance system, which calculates per-pupil funding based on a district’s average daily attendance over the course of the previous school year.
Russell W. Rumberger, a professor of education policy at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the director of the California Dropout Research Project, said the WestEd study is among a growing number of much-needed longitudinal studies tracking actual dropout patterns among high school students rather than relying on statistical calculations.
He said all the studies underscore the importance of 9th grade as the make-or-break year, and of accumulating course failures as a key trigger in students’ decision to leave school. “The kids with less course failures are the kids who re-enroll,” he noted.
Vol. 28, Issue 01, Pages 12-13
Back to Top
September 18, 2008 |Receive RSS
Advertisement
Related Stories
“Tackling the Dropout Crisis Comprehensively,” June 5, 2008.
“Project Aims to Tackle Dropout Problem, California-Style,” April 30, 2008.
“Dropout Campaigns Envisioned for States, 50 Key City Districts,” April 9, 2008.
Advertisement
© 2008 Editorial Projects in Education
About Us | Subscriptions | Site Licenses | Recruitment Advertising | Display Advertising | Policies | Help/FAQ | Contact us EW Archive
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Poll Shows Illinois Latinos Support School-Choice Programs (from Extra News)
This trend among Latinos is also mirrored by the Black community in the U.S. What the article doesn't say is that most families of color that support school choice are also low-income and are served by substandard school systems, so of course they would be in favor of alternatives to their failing schools. This research also creates a slippery slope where right-leaning pro-choice advocates take this information and co-opt it for their own political interests. This logic takes us down the road towards privatization. What we should be doing is finding ways to learn from successful public schools and invest in infrastructure to ensure that successful programs, policies, and practices thrive for low-income children of color. --Dr. Louie F. Rodriguez
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Extra News Posted on 01-04-2008
Poll Shows Illinois Latinos Support School-Choice Programs
(HISPANIC PR WIRE) — Late last month, the Hispanic Council for Reform and Educational Options gathered with other national school choice allies to host a roundtable discussion on the results of a statewide poll school choice, which was released Tuesday. The poll showed that many Latino parents in Illinois support expanding educational options in the state.
“This poll proves that Hispanics in Illinois are not satisfied with the status quo,” said Rebeca Nieves-Huffman, president of Hispanic CREO. “They want the most opportunities to provide their children with the best education possible. These parents need more educational options for their children.”
The poll revealed that 52 percent of Hispanics were in favor of parents using public funds to send their children to private school. The poll also revealed that 53 percent of participants would be in favor of instituting corporate tax-credit scholarships, which would use corporate donations to provide students with scholarships to attend private school.
In 2006, only 54 percent of Hispanic students in Illinois graduated from high school, compared with 85 percent of white students, according to the Alliance for Excellent Education, which tracks high school graduation rates across the country.
Hispanic CREO’s previous research has shown that Latino parents are widely in favor of school choice. A recent national poll conducted in collaboration with the Alliance for School Choice demonstrated that 75 percent of Latino parents would be interested in using vouchers to send their children to private school. The poll also revealed that 82 percent of Hispanic voters considered education to be a top priority for the 2008 presidential elections.
Hispanic CREO is the only organization in the United States committed to improving the educational outcomes of Latino children by empowering parents through school choice.
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Extra News Posted on 01-04-2008
Poll Shows Illinois Latinos Support School-Choice Programs
(HISPANIC PR WIRE) — Late last month, the Hispanic Council for Reform and Educational Options gathered with other national school choice allies to host a roundtable discussion on the results of a statewide poll school choice, which was released Tuesday. The poll showed that many Latino parents in Illinois support expanding educational options in the state.
“This poll proves that Hispanics in Illinois are not satisfied with the status quo,” said Rebeca Nieves-Huffman, president of Hispanic CREO. “They want the most opportunities to provide their children with the best education possible. These parents need more educational options for their children.”
The poll revealed that 52 percent of Hispanics were in favor of parents using public funds to send their children to private school. The poll also revealed that 53 percent of participants would be in favor of instituting corporate tax-credit scholarships, which would use corporate donations to provide students with scholarships to attend private school.
In 2006, only 54 percent of Hispanic students in Illinois graduated from high school, compared with 85 percent of white students, according to the Alliance for Excellent Education, which tracks high school graduation rates across the country.
Hispanic CREO’s previous research has shown that Latino parents are widely in favor of school choice. A recent national poll conducted in collaboration with the Alliance for School Choice demonstrated that 75 percent of Latino parents would be interested in using vouchers to send their children to private school. The poll also revealed that 82 percent of Hispanic voters considered education to be a top priority for the 2008 presidential elections.
Hispanic CREO is the only organization in the United States committed to improving the educational outcomes of Latino children by empowering parents through school choice.
1 in 5 fail portion of Grade 10 MCAS (from Boston Globe)
I would be interested in a study that looks at the achievement of low-income Black and Latina/o students attending middle-class suburban schools. Once again, we are at a point across the country when the test scores from the spring will be publicly reported and the same old story will continue to emerge--there is an achievement gap by race and class. What is usually left out of the narrative is the opportunity gap and all the other factors that impact equity in education.
-Dr. Louie F. Rodriguez
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1 in 5 fail portion of Grade 10 MCAS
Addition of science to exam a factor
By James Vaznis
Globe Staff / September 17, 2008
The percentage of sophomores who passed the MCAS exam on the first try this year declined for the first time because thousands of students failed the science section, a new graduation requirement, according to statewide scores released yesterday.
Globe Graphic MCAS trends
Twenty percent of the class of 2010 failed at least one portion of the test, compared with 13 percent last year, when sophomores needed to pass only the math and English portions.
One of the few bright spots in the latest results of the 10-year-old Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System exam was math, where scores hit a historic high for all grade levels. But even there, state education officials expressed concern that middle school math performance remained stubbornly sluggish. Subpar math scores have largely caused the state to designate two-thirds of the state's middle schools for improvement under a federal accountability law, according to a recent Globe analysis.
Overall, the results of the spring exams showed a persistent achievement gap, with white and Asian students outperforming other students at all grade levels, often by a wide margin, while reading scores for the youngest test-takers declined.
The mixed results prompted many state education advocates to highlight the urgent need to jump-start the state's 15-year-old effort to overhaul education, which they contend has sputtered in recent years.
"State policy makers are getting wobbly in their support for education and high standards," said Jamie Gass, director of the Center for School Reform at the Pioneer Institute.
The results could also provide fodder for next year's debate on Governor Deval Patrick's sweeping 10-year plan to better prepare students for college and jobs in the fields that drive the state's economy: biotechnology, engineering, healthcare, and other science-related fields.
State education officials were mostly upbeat about the results during a press conference yesterday morning. They applauded improvement in performance among student groups who historically struggle on the exam, such as black and Latino students, although the officials voiced frustration that the achievement gap remains wide.
For instance, in Grade 4 math, Latinos scoring in the top two categories improved by 4 percentage points, to 28 percent. White students improved by 2 percentage points, to 56 percent. The four scoring categories are advanced, proficient, needs improvement, and warning/failing.
"Students of color and low-income backgrounds have made more progress than their counterparts . . . but we need to do a better job," said Mitchell Chester, the state's commissioner of elementary and secondary education.
Yesterday the state released only statewide results for the exam, which is given each spring to students in grades 3 through 8 and in Grade 10. Individual district and school scores are scheduled for release next week. The exam, part of the 1993 Education Reform Act, was first given to students in 1998.
Students in the class of 2010, who took the MCAS this past spring as sophomores, will be the first group that must pass the science exam to graduate, adding to a five-year-old graduation requirement for passing the math and English exams. Students have the choice of testing in biology, chemistry, physics, or technology/engineering, and must take at least one of those exams either their freshman or sophomore year.
While the decrease in the percentage of students passing the test disappointed many educators and advocates, many believed that students did much better than expected on the science exam. The 17 percent of sophomores who failed the science exam this year represented a decrease from the 25 percent who flunked last year.
"This is a great start," said Jill Norton, executive director of the Rennie Center for Education Research and Policy. "As people become more familiar with the science exam, we'll see scores increase in the coming years."
However, many student groups who typically struggle in school are in jeopardy of not graduating because of the science exam, alarming many educators and advocates. Overall pass rates for English, math, and science show barely half of black and Latino 10th-graders and less than half of students with disabilities passed. Even more staggering, just 28 percent of students who speak limited English passed all three tests.
By contrast, 85 percent or more of Asian and white students passed.
"A tremendous amount of work remains," said Lance Hartford, executive director of the Massachusetts Biotechnology Education Foundation. "I'm increasingly concerned about the gap between inner-city students and what's going on with students in the rest of the state."
Boosting performance, educators and advocates said, may have to start as early as kindergarten to foster a genuine interest in the sciences among students. That, they said, will require devoting more time to the subject in elementary schools and more training for those teachers.
In secondary schools, the state is facing a critical shortage of qualified science teachers. Yesterday, educators and advocates said the state needs to do more to bolster the numbers by creating mentoring programs or paying those teachers more. Science labs, many of which date to the 1960s, also require updating.
In the short term, students who fail the science exam once can file an appeal with the state based on passing grades in a comparable high school course, under emergency rules adopted last week by the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. Students have to take the math and English exams three times before appealing.
Prospects for a successful appeal are slim. The department has granted only 2,800 appeals in the last five years, rejecting roughly 20 percent to 30 percent in recent years. A rejected appeal would force students to take the science test again.
Reading scores for younger students also raised concern. They dropped for grades 3, 4, and 5 after largely stagnating in recent years, prompting state education leaders once again to call for a renewed focus on the lower grades.
A student's ability to master reading is widely considered the best gauge of future academic success.
Chester said he believes schools are doing a good job in teaching the fundamentals of reading, such as letter and word identification, but more attention needs to be devoted to teaching students to read for meaning.
State Representative Patricia Haddad, a Somerset Democrat who is chairwoman of the Joint Committee on Education, said she found the flatness in the middle school scores in English to be the most worrisome.
"The middle school scores are a really good indicator of where kids are heading," she said.
Yesterday Chester and Education Secretary Paul Reville reaffirmed their support for MCAS testing as the governor embarks on a host of initiatives aimed at overhauling the education system. They were attempting to quash speculation within the state's education community that the less stringent appeals process on the science exam was a sign that the agency was softening its stance on MCAS as a graduation requirement.
"When you are adding a new requirement, like science," Chester said, "it's hard for me to see how that's backing off standards."
James Vaznis can be reached at jvaznis@globe.com.
-Dr. Louie F. Rodriguez
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1 in 5 fail portion of Grade 10 MCAS
Addition of science to exam a factor
By James Vaznis
Globe Staff / September 17, 2008
The percentage of sophomores who passed the MCAS exam on the first try this year declined for the first time because thousands of students failed the science section, a new graduation requirement, according to statewide scores released yesterday.
Globe Graphic MCAS trends
Twenty percent of the class of 2010 failed at least one portion of the test, compared with 13 percent last year, when sophomores needed to pass only the math and English portions.
One of the few bright spots in the latest results of the 10-year-old Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System exam was math, where scores hit a historic high for all grade levels. But even there, state education officials expressed concern that middle school math performance remained stubbornly sluggish. Subpar math scores have largely caused the state to designate two-thirds of the state's middle schools for improvement under a federal accountability law, according to a recent Globe analysis.
Overall, the results of the spring exams showed a persistent achievement gap, with white and Asian students outperforming other students at all grade levels, often by a wide margin, while reading scores for the youngest test-takers declined.
The mixed results prompted many state education advocates to highlight the urgent need to jump-start the state's 15-year-old effort to overhaul education, which they contend has sputtered in recent years.
"State policy makers are getting wobbly in their support for education and high standards," said Jamie Gass, director of the Center for School Reform at the Pioneer Institute.
The results could also provide fodder for next year's debate on Governor Deval Patrick's sweeping 10-year plan to better prepare students for college and jobs in the fields that drive the state's economy: biotechnology, engineering, healthcare, and other science-related fields.
State education officials were mostly upbeat about the results during a press conference yesterday morning. They applauded improvement in performance among student groups who historically struggle on the exam, such as black and Latino students, although the officials voiced frustration that the achievement gap remains wide.
For instance, in Grade 4 math, Latinos scoring in the top two categories improved by 4 percentage points, to 28 percent. White students improved by 2 percentage points, to 56 percent. The four scoring categories are advanced, proficient, needs improvement, and warning/failing.
"Students of color and low-income backgrounds have made more progress than their counterparts . . . but we need to do a better job," said Mitchell Chester, the state's commissioner of elementary and secondary education.
Yesterday the state released only statewide results for the exam, which is given each spring to students in grades 3 through 8 and in Grade 10. Individual district and school scores are scheduled for release next week. The exam, part of the 1993 Education Reform Act, was first given to students in 1998.
Students in the class of 2010, who took the MCAS this past spring as sophomores, will be the first group that must pass the science exam to graduate, adding to a five-year-old graduation requirement for passing the math and English exams. Students have the choice of testing in biology, chemistry, physics, or technology/engineering, and must take at least one of those exams either their freshman or sophomore year.
While the decrease in the percentage of students passing the test disappointed many educators and advocates, many believed that students did much better than expected on the science exam. The 17 percent of sophomores who failed the science exam this year represented a decrease from the 25 percent who flunked last year.
"This is a great start," said Jill Norton, executive director of the Rennie Center for Education Research and Policy. "As people become more familiar with the science exam, we'll see scores increase in the coming years."
However, many student groups who typically struggle in school are in jeopardy of not graduating because of the science exam, alarming many educators and advocates. Overall pass rates for English, math, and science show barely half of black and Latino 10th-graders and less than half of students with disabilities passed. Even more staggering, just 28 percent of students who speak limited English passed all three tests.
By contrast, 85 percent or more of Asian and white students passed.
"A tremendous amount of work remains," said Lance Hartford, executive director of the Massachusetts Biotechnology Education Foundation. "I'm increasingly concerned about the gap between inner-city students and what's going on with students in the rest of the state."
Boosting performance, educators and advocates said, may have to start as early as kindergarten to foster a genuine interest in the sciences among students. That, they said, will require devoting more time to the subject in elementary schools and more training for those teachers.
In secondary schools, the state is facing a critical shortage of qualified science teachers. Yesterday, educators and advocates said the state needs to do more to bolster the numbers by creating mentoring programs or paying those teachers more. Science labs, many of which date to the 1960s, also require updating.
In the short term, students who fail the science exam once can file an appeal with the state based on passing grades in a comparable high school course, under emergency rules adopted last week by the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. Students have to take the math and English exams three times before appealing.
Prospects for a successful appeal are slim. The department has granted only 2,800 appeals in the last five years, rejecting roughly 20 percent to 30 percent in recent years. A rejected appeal would force students to take the science test again.
Reading scores for younger students also raised concern. They dropped for grades 3, 4, and 5 after largely stagnating in recent years, prompting state education leaders once again to call for a renewed focus on the lower grades.
A student's ability to master reading is widely considered the best gauge of future academic success.
Chester said he believes schools are doing a good job in teaching the fundamentals of reading, such as letter and word identification, but more attention needs to be devoted to teaching students to read for meaning.
State Representative Patricia Haddad, a Somerset Democrat who is chairwoman of the Joint Committee on Education, said she found the flatness in the middle school scores in English to be the most worrisome.
"The middle school scores are a really good indicator of where kids are heading," she said.
Yesterday Chester and Education Secretary Paul Reville reaffirmed their support for MCAS testing as the governor embarks on a host of initiatives aimed at overhauling the education system. They were attempting to quash speculation within the state's education community that the less stringent appeals process on the science exam was a sign that the agency was softening its stance on MCAS as a graduation requirement.
"When you are adding a new requirement, like science," Chester said, "it's hard for me to see how that's backing off standards."
James Vaznis can be reached at jvaznis@globe.com.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Rudy Crew gets $368,000 to leave Miami-Dade schools (The Miami Herald)
My response coming soon! --Dr. Louie F. Rodriguez
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The Miami Herald
Posted on Wed, Sep. 10, 2008
Rudy Crew gets $368,000 to leave Miami-Dade schools
BY KATHLEEN McGRORY
Miami-Dade Schools Superintendent Rudy Crew and the School Board agreed to part ways Wednesday, ending Crew's tenure at the helm of the nation's fourth largest school district.
To buyout Crew's contract, the board will pay the schools chief a lump sum of $297,000. It will also provide Crew with health, disability and insurance benefits for two years and will contribute to his retirement.
The total severance package will cost the district $368,000, board Chairman Agustín Barrera said.
Said Barrera: ``Do we want to continue to barrage of attacking the administration publicly?''
Voting for the agreement: Barrera, board Vice Chairwoman Perla Tabares Hantman and board members Wilbert ''Tee'' Holloway, Martin Karp and Solomon Stinson.
''Man, if I were him, I'd be so happy,'' said Stinson. ``I'd be packing my clothes, leaving my house and getting the hell out of Dade County.''
Crew, whose final few months in Miami-Dade were riddled with controversy, did not attend the meeting.
Crew's attorney H.T. Smith said Crew was happy with the settlement, but that he had ``mixed emotions.''
''He loves the children, and he's concerned about the progress that's going to be made on his initiatives like the Parent Academy,'' Smith said. ``But he understands that the minority of board members have made him ineffective.''
Smith would not say if Crew had another job lined up. But he added, ``There will be a place for him in public education.''
Today is Crew's 58th birthday, his attorney said.
It's not the first time the Miami-Dade School board has ended its relationship with a schools chief on his birthday.
In 2001, Roger C. Cuevas was fired on a 6-3 vote on his 58th birthday.
Board members said they were happy to see the Crew matter settled and were already considering how to move forward.
Some board members said they believed the board would name Crew's successor later on in the meeting.
The decision to buy out Crew, this year's National Superintendent of the Year, came after only a short discussion at a School Board meeting Wednesday. Crew had said publicly that he was ready to leave the district, and even Crew's supporters said they wanted to move on.
Some board members were reluctant to pay Crew a severance package, given Crew's $325,000 salary.
Board member Marta Pérez called the deal ''overly generous,'' and said the board could not afford it.
''I think this could run into the millions of dollars,'' said Pérez, who has been one of Crew's most vocal critics. ``It seems to me that we are really giving and giving. And we don't have the money to give.''
Board member Renier Diaz de la Portilla asked Crew to resign without taking any severance.
''The district cannot afford this golden parachute,'' he said. ``How many jobs will be lost? How will it affect the classrooms?''
But Murray A. Greenberg, who was hired by the district last week to negotiate the buyout, called the deal ``fair.''
''This was the best we could do under the time constraints,'' he said.
Crew was wooed to Miami in 2004, where he became the highest paid superintendent in the country. Community leaders chipped in to buy him a house.
Crew will leave South Florida with a mixed record.
During his tenure, students posted incremental gains in reading, writing and math on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test.
Crew also helped reduce school overcrowding, and rallied businesses and local municipalities to take part in the school system.
But Crew's management abilities were called into question when the district came in overbudget two years in a row. And critics lambasted him for failing to reach out to Miami's Cuban community.
In June, board member Diaz de la Portilla, led a charge to fire Crew for cause.
While his campaign gained momentum over the summer, it was ultimately defeated in a 5-4 vote in August.
Later that month, Crew lost his majority on the board when incumbent School Board member Evelyn Greer lost her seat to retired principal Larry Feldman. Greer did not attend Wednesday's meeting.
On Thursday, the board hired Greenberg and voted to negotiate a buyout.
Had the board not negotiated a buyout, it could have fired Crew for any reason. But without cause, the board would have had to pay Crew what remains in his contract, or about $700,000.
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The Miami Herald
Posted on Wed, Sep. 10, 2008
Rudy Crew gets $368,000 to leave Miami-Dade schools
BY KATHLEEN McGRORY
Miami-Dade Schools Superintendent Rudy Crew and the School Board agreed to part ways Wednesday, ending Crew's tenure at the helm of the nation's fourth largest school district.
To buyout Crew's contract, the board will pay the schools chief a lump sum of $297,000. It will also provide Crew with health, disability and insurance benefits for two years and will contribute to his retirement.
The total severance package will cost the district $368,000, board Chairman Agustín Barrera said.
Said Barrera: ``Do we want to continue to barrage of attacking the administration publicly?''
Voting for the agreement: Barrera, board Vice Chairwoman Perla Tabares Hantman and board members Wilbert ''Tee'' Holloway, Martin Karp and Solomon Stinson.
''Man, if I were him, I'd be so happy,'' said Stinson. ``I'd be packing my clothes, leaving my house and getting the hell out of Dade County.''
Crew, whose final few months in Miami-Dade were riddled with controversy, did not attend the meeting.
Crew's attorney H.T. Smith said Crew was happy with the settlement, but that he had ``mixed emotions.''
''He loves the children, and he's concerned about the progress that's going to be made on his initiatives like the Parent Academy,'' Smith said. ``But he understands that the minority of board members have made him ineffective.''
Smith would not say if Crew had another job lined up. But he added, ``There will be a place for him in public education.''
Today is Crew's 58th birthday, his attorney said.
It's not the first time the Miami-Dade School board has ended its relationship with a schools chief on his birthday.
In 2001, Roger C. Cuevas was fired on a 6-3 vote on his 58th birthday.
Board members said they were happy to see the Crew matter settled and were already considering how to move forward.
Some board members said they believed the board would name Crew's successor later on in the meeting.
The decision to buy out Crew, this year's National Superintendent of the Year, came after only a short discussion at a School Board meeting Wednesday. Crew had said publicly that he was ready to leave the district, and even Crew's supporters said they wanted to move on.
Some board members were reluctant to pay Crew a severance package, given Crew's $325,000 salary.
Board member Marta Pérez called the deal ''overly generous,'' and said the board could not afford it.
''I think this could run into the millions of dollars,'' said Pérez, who has been one of Crew's most vocal critics. ``It seems to me that we are really giving and giving. And we don't have the money to give.''
Board member Renier Diaz de la Portilla asked Crew to resign without taking any severance.
''The district cannot afford this golden parachute,'' he said. ``How many jobs will be lost? How will it affect the classrooms?''
But Murray A. Greenberg, who was hired by the district last week to negotiate the buyout, called the deal ``fair.''
''This was the best we could do under the time constraints,'' he said.
Crew was wooed to Miami in 2004, where he became the highest paid superintendent in the country. Community leaders chipped in to buy him a house.
Crew will leave South Florida with a mixed record.
During his tenure, students posted incremental gains in reading, writing and math on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test.
Crew also helped reduce school overcrowding, and rallied businesses and local municipalities to take part in the school system.
But Crew's management abilities were called into question when the district came in overbudget two years in a row. And critics lambasted him for failing to reach out to Miami's Cuban community.
In June, board member Diaz de la Portilla, led a charge to fire Crew for cause.
While his campaign gained momentum over the summer, it was ultimately defeated in a 5-4 vote in August.
Later that month, Crew lost his majority on the board when incumbent School Board member Evelyn Greer lost her seat to retired principal Larry Feldman. Greer did not attend Wednesday's meeting.
On Thursday, the board hired Greenberg and voted to negotiate a buyout.
Had the board not negotiated a buyout, it could have fired Crew for any reason. But without cause, the board would have had to pay Crew what remains in his contract, or about $700,000.
U.S. teen: 'I felt like there were no dreams for me' (from CNN)
Powerful story about the impact of immigration raids on the lives of children and their families.
-Dr. Louie F. Rodriguez
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http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/wayoflife/09/10/citizen.children/index.html?iref=mpstoryview#cnnSTCText
-Dr. Louie F. Rodriguez
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http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/wayoflife/09/10/citizen.children/index.html?iref=mpstoryview#cnnSTCText
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Boycott Underscores Disparities in Schools Chicago Student Protest in Suburbs (from Washington Post)
How else can the urgency of the problem be communicated? It's obvious that high dropout and failure rates, in addition to community resource starvation is not enough to get the attention of policy-makers. So they seem to recognize, understand, and agree that the problem needs to be fixed. So where is the action? -Dr. Louie F. Rodriguez
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Washington Post
Boycott Underscores Disparities in SchoolsChicago Students Protest in Suburbs
By Kari LydersenWashington Post Staff WriterFriday, September 5, 2008; A02
CHICAGO -- It is the first week of school for Nadell Jackson, 13, and his brother Natavis, 14, and they are hoping to "get smarter and learn a lot more," in Nadell's words. But they often have to share books at the schools they attend on this city's South Side, meaning they can't take books home to study. Nadell craves better science books, and Natavis would like to see more after-school sports.
Science books and extracurricular activities are not lacking at New Trier Township High School in the northern suburb of Winnetka, which spends more than $15,000 annually on each student, compared with $10,000 per student in Chicago.
To protest this disparity between Chicago public schools and those in wealthier suburbs, the Jackson brothers were among about 1,000 students from Chicago who boycotted the first day of class Tuesday and instead showed up at New Trier and another suburban school asking to enroll. This demonstration was orchestrated by an Illinois state senator, James T. Meeks (D-Chicago), who is also a pastor at Salem Baptist Church on the South Side.
"We have to leave some books in class because there aren't enough; we need more computers; the auditorium has broken seats. We have to pay so much for the prom because the school can't help fund it," said De'Erica Munoz, 17, who commutes two hours each way to a high school on Chicago's North Side from her South Side neighborhood because the schools are better. But, even the North Side school she attends is subpar compared with those in New Trier.
"This looks like a college campus," she said as she looked around the New Trier school. "We should have the same opportunities as suburban kids."
The nonprofit Education Trust calculates that although the average gap in per-pupil spending across the country between high-income districts and low-income ones was $938 in 2005, the gap was $2,235 in Illinois. Only New York had a larger gap that year.
"These schools are segregated," said Rhonda Storball, a post office worker who moved to the suburbs specifically so her two children could attend better schools. She said she is now the only African American in her neighborhood and that her children had trouble adjusting to their new schools because their Chicago education left them behind academically.
On Tuesday, New Trier opened its gym and auditorium for Chicago students to fill out registration forms. But in keeping with state law, the students will be rejected because they do not live in the district.
Arne Duncan, chief executive of the Chicago school system, called the state's property-tax-based funding structure for education "fundamentally broken."
"It is totally separate and totally unequal," he said. "The children of the rich get a different education than the children of the poor. We continue to fight that battle every way we can."
In August, the Chicago Urban League filed a civil rights lawsuit in the Circuit Court of Cook County against the state of Illinois and state board of education. The suit alleges that the current funding of education violates the state constitution.
On Wednesday, Meeks brought busloads of boycotting students to downtown office buildings to protest. He called off the boycott Wednesday evening, saying he was still seeking a meeting with the governor and top legislators.
A recent analysis by the nonprofit Chicago-based Community Renewal Society found that statewide, lower-income districts have voted for higher property tax rates than wealthier areas, but the resulting funds raised for schools are still inadequate because property values are lower.
Though they agree school funding needs an overhaul, Mayor Richard M. Daley and Duncan stridently opposed the boycott, with Duncan calling it "the right fight but the wrong strategy." He visited seven African American and Latino churches on Sunday urging students to show up for school. He said first-day attendance was high despite the boycott, thanks to school district efforts including canvassing and distribution of free school supplies.
Meeks proposed a pilot project to spend $120 million over three years to create new schools and measure the academic results. He offered to call off the boycott if Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D) and state legislators met with him during the Democratic National Convention in Denver. The meeting did not take place.
"The governor likes the concept but wants to hear more," Blagojevich spokesman Lucio Guerrero said. "That they weren't able to get together in Denver shouldn't be the end of it. It's still something he wants to pursue."
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Washington Post
Boycott Underscores Disparities in SchoolsChicago Students Protest in Suburbs
By Kari LydersenWashington Post Staff WriterFriday, September 5, 2008; A02
CHICAGO -- It is the first week of school for Nadell Jackson, 13, and his brother Natavis, 14, and they are hoping to "get smarter and learn a lot more," in Nadell's words. But they often have to share books at the schools they attend on this city's South Side, meaning they can't take books home to study. Nadell craves better science books, and Natavis would like to see more after-school sports.
Science books and extracurricular activities are not lacking at New Trier Township High School in the northern suburb of Winnetka, which spends more than $15,000 annually on each student, compared with $10,000 per student in Chicago.
To protest this disparity between Chicago public schools and those in wealthier suburbs, the Jackson brothers were among about 1,000 students from Chicago who boycotted the first day of class Tuesday and instead showed up at New Trier and another suburban school asking to enroll. This demonstration was orchestrated by an Illinois state senator, James T. Meeks (D-Chicago), who is also a pastor at Salem Baptist Church on the South Side.
"We have to leave some books in class because there aren't enough; we need more computers; the auditorium has broken seats. We have to pay so much for the prom because the school can't help fund it," said De'Erica Munoz, 17, who commutes two hours each way to a high school on Chicago's North Side from her South Side neighborhood because the schools are better. But, even the North Side school she attends is subpar compared with those in New Trier.
"This looks like a college campus," she said as she looked around the New Trier school. "We should have the same opportunities as suburban kids."
The nonprofit Education Trust calculates that although the average gap in per-pupil spending across the country between high-income districts and low-income ones was $938 in 2005, the gap was $2,235 in Illinois. Only New York had a larger gap that year.
"These schools are segregated," said Rhonda Storball, a post office worker who moved to the suburbs specifically so her two children could attend better schools. She said she is now the only African American in her neighborhood and that her children had trouble adjusting to their new schools because their Chicago education left them behind academically.
On Tuesday, New Trier opened its gym and auditorium for Chicago students to fill out registration forms. But in keeping with state law, the students will be rejected because they do not live in the district.
Arne Duncan, chief executive of the Chicago school system, called the state's property-tax-based funding structure for education "fundamentally broken."
"It is totally separate and totally unequal," he said. "The children of the rich get a different education than the children of the poor. We continue to fight that battle every way we can."
In August, the Chicago Urban League filed a civil rights lawsuit in the Circuit Court of Cook County against the state of Illinois and state board of education. The suit alleges that the current funding of education violates the state constitution.
On Wednesday, Meeks brought busloads of boycotting students to downtown office buildings to protest. He called off the boycott Wednesday evening, saying he was still seeking a meeting with the governor and top legislators.
A recent analysis by the nonprofit Chicago-based Community Renewal Society found that statewide, lower-income districts have voted for higher property tax rates than wealthier areas, but the resulting funds raised for schools are still inadequate because property values are lower.
Though they agree school funding needs an overhaul, Mayor Richard M. Daley and Duncan stridently opposed the boycott, with Duncan calling it "the right fight but the wrong strategy." He visited seven African American and Latino churches on Sunday urging students to show up for school. He said first-day attendance was high despite the boycott, thanks to school district efforts including canvassing and distribution of free school supplies.
Meeks proposed a pilot project to spend $120 million over three years to create new schools and measure the academic results. He offered to call off the boycott if Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D) and state legislators met with him during the Democratic National Convention in Denver. The meeting did not take place.
"The governor likes the concept but wants to hear more," Blagojevich spokesman Lucio Guerrero said. "That they weren't able to get together in Denver shouldn't be the end of it. It's still something he wants to pursue."
Hold Your Heads Up (from NY Times)
Herbert really makes me think about the "values" conversations within the presidential elections. This also reminds me of the point Barack Obama made his book Audacity of Hope. He talks a lot about a failed ideology on the Right side of the aisle. Herbert just seems to hit this point home on various issues below. The tale on the education policy side has yet to be formally told but our struggling schools tell us everyday. -Dr. Louie F. Rodriguez
---------------------------------------------------------------------
NY Times
September 9, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Hold Your Heads Up
By BOB HERBERT
Ignorance must really be bliss. How else, over so many years, could the G.O.P. get away with ridiculing all things liberal?
Troglodytes on the right are no respecters of reality. They say the most absurd things and hardly anyone calls them on it. Evolution? Don’t you believe it. Global warming? A figment of the liberal imagination.
Liberals have been so cowed by the pummeling they’ve taken from the right that they’ve tried to shed their own identity, calling themselves everything but liberal and hoping to pass conservative muster by presenting themselves as hyper-religious and lifelong lovers of rifles, handguns, whatever.
So there was Hillary Clinton, of all people, sponsoring legislation to ban flag-burning; and Barack Obama, who once opposed the death penalty, morphing into someone who not only supports it, but supports it in cases that don’t even involve a homicide.
Anyway, the Republicans were back at it last week at their convention. Mitt Romney wasn’t content to insist that he personally knows that “liberals don’t have a clue.” He complained loudly that the federal government right now is too liberal.
“We need change, all right,” he said. “Change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington.”
Why liberals don’t stand up to this garbage, I don’t know. Without the extraordinary contribution of liberals — from the mightiest presidents to the most unheralded protesters and organizers — the United States would be a much, much worse place than it is today.
There would be absolutely no chance that a Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton or Sarah Palin could make a credible run for the highest offices in the land. Conservatives would never have allowed it.
Civil rights? Women’s rights? Liberals went to the mat for them time and again against ugly, vicious and sometimes murderous opposition. They should be forever proud.
The liberals who didn’t have a clue gave us Social Security and unemployment insurance, both of which were contained in the original Social Security Act. Most conservatives despised the very idea of this assistance to struggling Americans. Republicans hated Social Security, but most were afraid to give full throat to their opposition in public at the height of the Depression.
“In the procedural motions that preceded final passage,” wrote historian Jean Edward Smith in his biography, “FDR,” “House Republicans voted almost unanimously against Social Security. But when the final up-or-down vote came on April 19 [1935], fewer than half were prepared to go on record against.”
Liberals who didn’t have a clue gave us Medicare and Medicaid. Quick, how many of you (or your loved ones) are benefiting mightily from these programs, even as we speak. The idea that Republicans are proud of Ronald Reagan, who saw Medicare as “the advance wave of socialism,” while Democrats are ashamed of Lyndon Johnson, whose legislative genius made this wonderful, life-saving concept real, is insane.
When Johnson signed the Medicare bill into law in the presence of Harry Truman in 1965, he said: “No longer will older Americans be denied the healing miracle of modern medicine.”
Reagan, on the other hand, according to Johnson biographer Robert Dallek, “predicted that Medicare would compel Americans to spend their ‘sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was like in America when men were free.’ ”
Scary.
Without the many great and noble deeds of liberals over the past six or seven decades, America would hardly be recognizable to today’s young people. Liberals (including liberal Republicans, who have since been mostly drummed out of the party) ended legalized racial segregation and gender discrimination.
Humiliation imposed by custom and enforced by government had been the order of the day for blacks and women before men and women of good will and liberal persuasion stepped up their long (and not yet ended) campaign to change things. Liberals gave this country Head Start and legal services and the food stamp program. They fought for cleaner air (there was a time when you could barely see Los Angeles) and cleaner water (there were rivers in America that actually caught fire).
Liberals. Your food is safer because of them, and so are your children’s clothing and toys. Your workplace is safer. Your ability (or that of your children or grandchildren) to go to college is manifestly easier.
It would take volumes to adequately cover the enhancements to the quality of American lives and the greatness of American society that have been wrought by people whose politics were unabashedly liberal. It is a track record that deserves to be celebrated, not ridiculed or scorned.
Self-hatred is a terrible thing. Just ask that arch-conservative Clarence Thomas.
Liberals need to get over it.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
NY Times
September 9, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Hold Your Heads Up
By BOB HERBERT
Ignorance must really be bliss. How else, over so many years, could the G.O.P. get away with ridiculing all things liberal?
Troglodytes on the right are no respecters of reality. They say the most absurd things and hardly anyone calls them on it. Evolution? Don’t you believe it. Global warming? A figment of the liberal imagination.
Liberals have been so cowed by the pummeling they’ve taken from the right that they’ve tried to shed their own identity, calling themselves everything but liberal and hoping to pass conservative muster by presenting themselves as hyper-religious and lifelong lovers of rifles, handguns, whatever.
So there was Hillary Clinton, of all people, sponsoring legislation to ban flag-burning; and Barack Obama, who once opposed the death penalty, morphing into someone who not only supports it, but supports it in cases that don’t even involve a homicide.
Anyway, the Republicans were back at it last week at their convention. Mitt Romney wasn’t content to insist that he personally knows that “liberals don’t have a clue.” He complained loudly that the federal government right now is too liberal.
“We need change, all right,” he said. “Change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington.”
Why liberals don’t stand up to this garbage, I don’t know. Without the extraordinary contribution of liberals — from the mightiest presidents to the most unheralded protesters and organizers — the United States would be a much, much worse place than it is today.
There would be absolutely no chance that a Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton or Sarah Palin could make a credible run for the highest offices in the land. Conservatives would never have allowed it.
Civil rights? Women’s rights? Liberals went to the mat for them time and again against ugly, vicious and sometimes murderous opposition. They should be forever proud.
The liberals who didn’t have a clue gave us Social Security and unemployment insurance, both of which were contained in the original Social Security Act. Most conservatives despised the very idea of this assistance to struggling Americans. Republicans hated Social Security, but most were afraid to give full throat to their opposition in public at the height of the Depression.
“In the procedural motions that preceded final passage,” wrote historian Jean Edward Smith in his biography, “FDR,” “House Republicans voted almost unanimously against Social Security. But when the final up-or-down vote came on April 19 [1935], fewer than half were prepared to go on record against.”
Liberals who didn’t have a clue gave us Medicare and Medicaid. Quick, how many of you (or your loved ones) are benefiting mightily from these programs, even as we speak. The idea that Republicans are proud of Ronald Reagan, who saw Medicare as “the advance wave of socialism,” while Democrats are ashamed of Lyndon Johnson, whose legislative genius made this wonderful, life-saving concept real, is insane.
When Johnson signed the Medicare bill into law in the presence of Harry Truman in 1965, he said: “No longer will older Americans be denied the healing miracle of modern medicine.”
Reagan, on the other hand, according to Johnson biographer Robert Dallek, “predicted that Medicare would compel Americans to spend their ‘sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was like in America when men were free.’ ”
Scary.
Without the many great and noble deeds of liberals over the past six or seven decades, America would hardly be recognizable to today’s young people. Liberals (including liberal Republicans, who have since been mostly drummed out of the party) ended legalized racial segregation and gender discrimination.
Humiliation imposed by custom and enforced by government had been the order of the day for blacks and women before men and women of good will and liberal persuasion stepped up their long (and not yet ended) campaign to change things. Liberals gave this country Head Start and legal services and the food stamp program. They fought for cleaner air (there was a time when you could barely see Los Angeles) and cleaner water (there were rivers in America that actually caught fire).
Liberals. Your food is safer because of them, and so are your children’s clothing and toys. Your workplace is safer. Your ability (or that of your children or grandchildren) to go to college is manifestly easier.
It would take volumes to adequately cover the enhancements to the quality of American lives and the greatness of American society that have been wrought by people whose politics were unabashedly liberal. It is a track record that deserves to be celebrated, not ridiculed or scorned.
Self-hatred is a terrible thing. Just ask that arch-conservative Clarence Thomas.
Liberals need to get over it.
Monday, September 8, 2008
A unifying election? (from Orlando Sentinel)
This opportunity can possibly be a model for the nation. -Dr. Louie F. Rodriguez
================================================
orlandosentinel.com/community/news/ucf/orl-blackhisp0808sep08,0,1788184.story
OrlandoSentinel.com
Campaign 2008
A unifying election?
Jeff Kunerth and Victor Manuel Ramos
Sentinel Staff Writers
September 8, 2008
If Barack Obama wants to win Central Florida and carry the state in November, he'll need the votes of Hispanics, who constitute 14 percent of the region's registered voters.For that to happen, Obama must prove himself as the candidate who can transcend the everyday differences that separate blacks and Hispanics.In Central Florida, the two minority groups have many issues in common -- discrimination, health care, public education -- but diverge when it comes to language, jobs and immigration.To many blacks, such as 61-year-old Lamont Flournoy Sr., it comes down to a competition for jobs. Many businesses that once hired blacks now prefer Hispanics because they will perform the same work for less money, he said.Other blacks pick up on racism from Hispanics who come from countries where discrimination against blacks is as bad, or worse, as in the United States, said University of Central Florida history Professor Vibert White. And even though blacks and Hispanics both experience prejudice from whites, some blacks say they perceive Hispanics as receiving better treatment because of their skin color,"Hispanics see themselves as being white," said Chodry Andre, 31, a barber, who is black. "They go through some of what we go through, but not all of what we go through."Hispanics contend that whatever differences they have with blacks, race is not the main issue. The bulk of Central Florida's Hispanic population has Caribbean roots, originating from racially mixed places such as Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Dominican Republic, where a significant portion of the population is of African descent.Power shiftMore of a problem than racism is a lack of familiarity between the two groups, a lack of common history and a shifting balance of power."Remember that African-Americans had been the largest minority in the United States for all of the country's history," said Ada V. Garc�a, a Hispanic events organizer. "But they have seen that we are growing rapidly and that we are taking their place."In Orlando, there have been several attempts to create coalitions between blacks and Hispanics. In 2001, after Hispanics surpassed blacks as the largest minority in Florida, the Orange branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People talked about recruiting Hispanics into the civil-rights organization. It never happened."I don't think there's been a great effort on the part of the African-American and Latino communities to join efforts," said Gerald Bell, former president of the Orange branch of the NAACP.Several years ago, there were efforts to form an alliance between the state conference of the NAACP in Orlando and Latino Leadership, a Hispanic-advocacy group. But nothing came of it."It wasn't way up on the list of priorities," said Beverlye Colson Neal, executive director of the Florida State Conference of the NAACP.Since then, the two communities have drifted further apart, said Latino Leadership President Marytza Sanz."Latinos and blacks coming together, I don't see that happening," Sanz said.The division between the black and Hispanic communities became apparent in 2006 when, in one of the largest protest marches in Orlando's history, more than 20,000 Hispanics showed up in support of immigration reform. Although black leadership endorsed the march, black residents watched from the sidelines."The reason many blacks didn't join them is that before that, they [Hispanics] had ignored them," White said.Lack of bad bloodIgnoring each other largely defines the history of relations between blacks and Hispanics in Orlando. The city has not experienced the clashes between the two minorities found in other cities. They haven't engaged in the bitter political battles between black and Hispanic candidates in Miami, Los Angeles and Houston. They haven't experienced the residential turf wars -- Hispanics moving into historically black neighborhoods -- found in other cities.And that lack of bad blood might benefit Obama when Central Florida Hispanics go the polls in November."It is still possible that Mr. Obama is going to transcend the divisions that separate Latino and black Americans," White said. "He is a special type of African-American. He is looked upon as a benign individual who understands class, culture, heritage and race among various groups."Arthur Watson, a 62-year-old Frito-Lay worker, thinks the economic hard times will win Obama the Hispanic vote. "The economy applies to people everywhere, no matter what the race. If you are a working person, the economy has you by the throat."And there's another reason Hispanics will vote for Obama over John McCain, Watson contends: "Hispanics will vote for him out of party loyalty. They are loyal people."In Obama's favor, Hispanics in Central Florida are predominantly Democratic. Of the 194,000 Hispanic registered voters in Orange, Seminole, Osceola, Lake and Volusia counties, 42 percent are Democrats; 20 percent, Republican.Just as recent national polls have reflected, many Central Florida Hispanics are overcoming their initial skepticism to support Obama."For Latinos, he is a person of color who is talking about our issues, and it's important to put our support behind him without necessarily letting go of our concerns," said Evelyn Luciano-Carter, a consultant on diversity issues who is Puerto Rican and married to an African-American man.For her husband, Mel Carter, a United Parcel Service account executive, Obama represents a chance to unite. "I think there is an opportunity to bridge these two cultures together."
Jeff Kunerth can be reached at jkunerth@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5392. Victor Manuel Ramos can be reached at vramos@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-6186.
================================================
orlandosentinel.com/community/news/ucf/orl-blackhisp0808sep08,0,1788184.story
OrlandoSentinel.com
Campaign 2008
A unifying election?
Jeff Kunerth and Victor Manuel Ramos
Sentinel Staff Writers
September 8, 2008
If Barack Obama wants to win Central Florida and carry the state in November, he'll need the votes of Hispanics, who constitute 14 percent of the region's registered voters.For that to happen, Obama must prove himself as the candidate who can transcend the everyday differences that separate blacks and Hispanics.In Central Florida, the two minority groups have many issues in common -- discrimination, health care, public education -- but diverge when it comes to language, jobs and immigration.To many blacks, such as 61-year-old Lamont Flournoy Sr., it comes down to a competition for jobs. Many businesses that once hired blacks now prefer Hispanics because they will perform the same work for less money, he said.Other blacks pick up on racism from Hispanics who come from countries where discrimination against blacks is as bad, or worse, as in the United States, said University of Central Florida history Professor Vibert White. And even though blacks and Hispanics both experience prejudice from whites, some blacks say they perceive Hispanics as receiving better treatment because of their skin color,"Hispanics see themselves as being white," said Chodry Andre, 31, a barber, who is black. "They go through some of what we go through, but not all of what we go through."Hispanics contend that whatever differences they have with blacks, race is not the main issue. The bulk of Central Florida's Hispanic population has Caribbean roots, originating from racially mixed places such as Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Dominican Republic, where a significant portion of the population is of African descent.Power shiftMore of a problem than racism is a lack of familiarity between the two groups, a lack of common history and a shifting balance of power."Remember that African-Americans had been the largest minority in the United States for all of the country's history," said Ada V. Garc�a, a Hispanic events organizer. "But they have seen that we are growing rapidly and that we are taking their place."In Orlando, there have been several attempts to create coalitions between blacks and Hispanics. In 2001, after Hispanics surpassed blacks as the largest minority in Florida, the Orange branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People talked about recruiting Hispanics into the civil-rights organization. It never happened."I don't think there's been a great effort on the part of the African-American and Latino communities to join efforts," said Gerald Bell, former president of the Orange branch of the NAACP.Several years ago, there were efforts to form an alliance between the state conference of the NAACP in Orlando and Latino Leadership, a Hispanic-advocacy group. But nothing came of it."It wasn't way up on the list of priorities," said Beverlye Colson Neal, executive director of the Florida State Conference of the NAACP.Since then, the two communities have drifted further apart, said Latino Leadership President Marytza Sanz."Latinos and blacks coming together, I don't see that happening," Sanz said.The division between the black and Hispanic communities became apparent in 2006 when, in one of the largest protest marches in Orlando's history, more than 20,000 Hispanics showed up in support of immigration reform. Although black leadership endorsed the march, black residents watched from the sidelines."The reason many blacks didn't join them is that before that, they [Hispanics] had ignored them," White said.Lack of bad bloodIgnoring each other largely defines the history of relations between blacks and Hispanics in Orlando. The city has not experienced the clashes between the two minorities found in other cities. They haven't engaged in the bitter political battles between black and Hispanic candidates in Miami, Los Angeles and Houston. They haven't experienced the residential turf wars -- Hispanics moving into historically black neighborhoods -- found in other cities.And that lack of bad blood might benefit Obama when Central Florida Hispanics go the polls in November."It is still possible that Mr. Obama is going to transcend the divisions that separate Latino and black Americans," White said. "He is a special type of African-American. He is looked upon as a benign individual who understands class, culture, heritage and race among various groups."Arthur Watson, a 62-year-old Frito-Lay worker, thinks the economic hard times will win Obama the Hispanic vote. "The economy applies to people everywhere, no matter what the race. If you are a working person, the economy has you by the throat."And there's another reason Hispanics will vote for Obama over John McCain, Watson contends: "Hispanics will vote for him out of party loyalty. They are loyal people."In Obama's favor, Hispanics in Central Florida are predominantly Democratic. Of the 194,000 Hispanic registered voters in Orange, Seminole, Osceola, Lake and Volusia counties, 42 percent are Democrats; 20 percent, Republican.Just as recent national polls have reflected, many Central Florida Hispanics are overcoming their initial skepticism to support Obama."For Latinos, he is a person of color who is talking about our issues, and it's important to put our support behind him without necessarily letting go of our concerns," said Evelyn Luciano-Carter, a consultant on diversity issues who is Puerto Rican and married to an African-American man.For her husband, Mel Carter, a United Parcel Service account executive, Obama represents a chance to unite. "I think there is an opportunity to bridge these two cultures together."
Jeff Kunerth can be reached at jkunerth@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5392. Victor Manuel Ramos can be reached at vramos@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-6186.
Miami Schools Chief to Leave Amid Discord (from NY Times)
It is so interesting how the tone of this article in the NY Times differs from those out of south Florida. Dr. Crew's challenges in Miami go far beyond the school board. I have been following the story in Miami for a while now and I have yet to hear that Dr. Crew's departure in New York was somehow connected to a dispute with then Mayor Giuliani (see below). To my knowledge, this has yet to be mentioned in South Florida. I believe that Dr. Crew, as the nation's Superintendent of the Year, is being pushed out and the process seems to have started a long time ago. -Dr. Louie F. Rodriguez
------------------------------------------------------------------------
New York Times
September 9, 2008
Miami Schools Chief to Leave Amid Discord
By DAMIEN CAVE and YOLANNE ALMANZAR
MIAMI — The Miami-Dade County School Board and Rudy Crew, the bold superintendent who came here four years ago promising to overhaul education as he did in New York City, have agreed to part ways.
The board voted Monday to begin negotiations on a severance package, capping more than a year filled with racial recriminations and rising tensions over the school budget.
“Right now we have irreconcilable differences,” the board’s chairman, Agustin J. Barrera, said at a special meeting to discuss Dr. Crew. “There are board members that, no matter what the superintendent does, will never support him.”
Dr. Crew, who did not attend Monday’s meeting, declined to comment. In an interview published Sunday in The Miami Herald, he said, “I feel like I did the best I could.”
The departure brings to a close Dr. Crew’s second stint as a big-city superintendent. He spent four years leading the New York City schools, leaving in 1999 with a mixed record after a dispute with Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani over Mr. Giuliani’s desire to use tax money to send children to private school.
Dr. Crew went on to become director of district reform initiatives at the Stupski Foundation, a private philanthropic organization, and arrived in Miami in 2004. Promising to raise achievement in the nation’s fourth-largest school district, with 353,000 students, he seized control of the worst schools from local administrators and raised salaries for teachers who agreed to work in them.
He had some success. More Miami students now take Advanced Placement courses, a measure of college preparedness, and scores on state achievement tests have increased slightly but steadily in math, reading and writing since 2004.
The district initially seemed pleased. In 2006, Dr. Crew’s contract was extended through 2010, when his salary was to peak at $360,000 plus as much as $80,000 in a bonus. But over the last year, with Miami-Dade schools struggling under the strain of state budget cuts and declining enrollment, he has increasingly come under fire.
A growing mood of racial distrust has also poisoned the debate. In 2006, two members of Dr. Crew’s staff accused Ralph Arza, a white Cuban-American who was then a member of the Florida House, of using racial epithets to describe the superintendent, who is black. The episode ultimately led to Mr. Arza’s resignation from the Legislature.
Dr. Crew, meanwhile, has been accused of discrimination by several former employees, including a white woman who says she was demoted for the sake of diversity. (Dr. Crew has denied any bias.)
The volatile situation peaked at a school board meeting last week when a Hispanic member of the board severely criticized the superintendent’s proposal to balance the district’s $5.5 billion budget by reducing spending on bilingual education, prompting Dr. Crew to respond, “Do not talk to me like a dog!”
Monday’s meeting was quieter with Dr. Crew absent. But several of the board’s nine members maintained that he deserved much of the blame for what is now a $66 million budget shortfall for the 2008-9 school year. One member, Renier Diaz de la Portilla, said Dr. Crew should be fired or resign, without severance.
“I think we have an obligation to seek every possible remedy that does not involve giving Rudy Crew more money,” Mr. Diaz de la Portilla said. “We haven’t explored any other options other than giving Rudy Crew a golden parachute, and I think that’s wrong. That’s not what I was elected to do.”
A settlement seems likely, though. Murray A. Greenberg, outside counsel for the board, pointed out that Dr. Crew’s contract allowed for his firing without severance only if the district could prove “gross insubordination,” a difficult task.
Wilbert Holloway, one of the few members who support Dr. Crew, said the board and the superintendent just wanted to move on.
“I think that today’s effort is a material way of stopping and saying, ‘The time has come that we part,’ ” Dr. Holloway said. “Let’s try to stop the attacks and the charges against this individual and move forward.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
New York Times
September 9, 2008
Miami Schools Chief to Leave Amid Discord
By DAMIEN CAVE and YOLANNE ALMANZAR
MIAMI — The Miami-Dade County School Board and Rudy Crew, the bold superintendent who came here four years ago promising to overhaul education as he did in New York City, have agreed to part ways.
The board voted Monday to begin negotiations on a severance package, capping more than a year filled with racial recriminations and rising tensions over the school budget.
“Right now we have irreconcilable differences,” the board’s chairman, Agustin J. Barrera, said at a special meeting to discuss Dr. Crew. “There are board members that, no matter what the superintendent does, will never support him.”
Dr. Crew, who did not attend Monday’s meeting, declined to comment. In an interview published Sunday in The Miami Herald, he said, “I feel like I did the best I could.”
The departure brings to a close Dr. Crew’s second stint as a big-city superintendent. He spent four years leading the New York City schools, leaving in 1999 with a mixed record after a dispute with Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani over Mr. Giuliani’s desire to use tax money to send children to private school.
Dr. Crew went on to become director of district reform initiatives at the Stupski Foundation, a private philanthropic organization, and arrived in Miami in 2004. Promising to raise achievement in the nation’s fourth-largest school district, with 353,000 students, he seized control of the worst schools from local administrators and raised salaries for teachers who agreed to work in them.
He had some success. More Miami students now take Advanced Placement courses, a measure of college preparedness, and scores on state achievement tests have increased slightly but steadily in math, reading and writing since 2004.
The district initially seemed pleased. In 2006, Dr. Crew’s contract was extended through 2010, when his salary was to peak at $360,000 plus as much as $80,000 in a bonus. But over the last year, with Miami-Dade schools struggling under the strain of state budget cuts and declining enrollment, he has increasingly come under fire.
A growing mood of racial distrust has also poisoned the debate. In 2006, two members of Dr. Crew’s staff accused Ralph Arza, a white Cuban-American who was then a member of the Florida House, of using racial epithets to describe the superintendent, who is black. The episode ultimately led to Mr. Arza’s resignation from the Legislature.
Dr. Crew, meanwhile, has been accused of discrimination by several former employees, including a white woman who says she was demoted for the sake of diversity. (Dr. Crew has denied any bias.)
The volatile situation peaked at a school board meeting last week when a Hispanic member of the board severely criticized the superintendent’s proposal to balance the district’s $5.5 billion budget by reducing spending on bilingual education, prompting Dr. Crew to respond, “Do not talk to me like a dog!”
Monday’s meeting was quieter with Dr. Crew absent. But several of the board’s nine members maintained that he deserved much of the blame for what is now a $66 million budget shortfall for the 2008-9 school year. One member, Renier Diaz de la Portilla, said Dr. Crew should be fired or resign, without severance.
“I think we have an obligation to seek every possible remedy that does not involve giving Rudy Crew more money,” Mr. Diaz de la Portilla said. “We haven’t explored any other options other than giving Rudy Crew a golden parachute, and I think that’s wrong. That’s not what I was elected to do.”
A settlement seems likely, though. Murray A. Greenberg, outside counsel for the board, pointed out that Dr. Crew’s contract allowed for his firing without severance only if the district could prove “gross insubordination,” a difficult task.
Wilbert Holloway, one of the few members who support Dr. Crew, said the board and the superintendent just wanted to move on.
“I think that today’s effort is a material way of stopping and saying, ‘The time has come that we part,’ ” Dr. Holloway said. “Let’s try to stop the attacks and the charges against this individual and move forward.”
Sunday, September 7, 2008
Inadequate coverage of Miami-Dade School Board-Rudy Crew saga (from Miami Herald)
Definitley some questions we should be thinking about as this chapter unfolds.
-Dr. Louie F. Rodriguez
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Miami Herald
Posted on Sun, Sep. 07, 2008
Inadequate coverage of Miami-Dade School Board-Rudy Crew saga
BY EDWARD SCHUMACHER-MATOS
No story is more important to you and me as readers of The Miami Herald than the state of our schools. In them lie not just the obvious future of our children, but the less obvious future of our local economy, our home values and our civic culture.
So the shocking fall of Miami-Dade schools superintendent Rudy Crew from being named National Superintendent of the Year by his peers to what even his backers say will be his likely firing or resignation would seem to be grist for crucial stories about just what is happening in the schools.
But those stories have gone missing. Since the saga devolved over the past 10 weeks from School Board grousing to racially tinged charges by Crew, who is African-American, of being ''lynched'' and ''treated like a dog,'' the coverage has been almost exclusively about political in-fighting, with mostly a ''he-said, she-said'' sort of false objectivity.
Manny Garcia, Senior Editor of News, said that The Herald has been planning for some time to do a more analytical step-back but that the daily rush of a fast-evolving story and the changes created by the recent staff cutbacks have interfered. The education editor took a recent buyout, and a new education editor, Heidi Carr, began last week.
''I don't want it to be an excuse,'' Garcia said. ``We have to deliver strong daily copy, but we need also to find the time to give the enterprise and context readers expect from us.''
As I write, an analytical story that Garcia says will ''look at benchmarks of how superintendents are normally measured across the country'' and examines the challenges that await the next superintendent is being prepared and will run elsewhere in the paper today. I have not seen the article, but I question whether even it will be enough.
[Editor's note: The article mentioned above, which was researched and reported over the past three weeks, appears today on Page 1A.]
The article also comes late. Some board members were up for reelection two weeks ago, which resulted in a balance of power shifting to Crew's critics. Whether better coverage would have changed the vote will never be known.
None of my criticism is meant to take sides. Crew often seems to be his own worst enemy. He has been strangely poor at board, media and community relations. His lapses have allowed critics to set the tone of the debate and make even mundane issues a referendum on his performance. This doesn't mean that The Miami Herald should allow itself to be played.
ISSUES THAT MATTER
Two real issues for readers, it seems to me, are whether Crew has been a good educator and a good manager.
On the first, the consensus seems to be that Crew has raised the educational quality of the schools. Yet, not one article over the past 10 weeks explored Crew's educational record. A review of the past six months finds several good features on individual schools and a wonderful back-to-school package. But there is little analytical coverage, and the one story that attempts this is a hatchet job. ''Zone initiative ineffective,'' said the June 27 headline about an internal report ''obtained'' by The Herald. The ''ineffectiveness'' concerned the first year of the new School Improvement Zone program. That year ended two years ago. The story offered almost nothing about the program's development since, making the report near worthless today.
Yet it was treated as a great revelation, critical of a signature Crew innovation. It even quoted Crew critic and board member Ana Rivas Logan saying of the entire program: ''According to this report, it was a total flop.'' I have no idea if the program today is a failure, but that was a dishonest quote about a report that dealt only with the first year. It never should have been allowed to stand alone, if even published.
Crew's management record in going over this and last year's budgets is the source of much criticism. This year's overrun, by my simple calculation from the confusing stories, is less than 1.5 percent. Is that major? Unprecedented? I don't know from The Herald's coverage, which never analyzes the budget.
I do know that news columnist Miriam Marquez was unfair when she blamed Crew for sloppiness because of an unjustified $10,000 moving expense by a school attorney. The executive in charge of a $5.5 billion budget should not be checking employee expense accounts.
One story by reporter Nirvi Shah at least gave an insightful measure by which to judge Crew. Shah compared the more-harmonious board and budget process in Broward County. There, new superintendent Jim Notter, according to Shah, is more solicitous of the board than Crew. He also began last year to make larger cutbacks in anticipation of state cuts.
The implications I derive from the coverage and reader letters is that Crew may have been more focused on pushing educational improvements, despite the new budget realities. ''We're at a crossroads here,'' board chairman Agustín Barrera says in a July 16 story by Kathleen McGrory that nicely lists a lot of the budget and political issues. ``We're being funded for basic education, and that's what we're going to have to provide.''
Wow. If that's true, where are the follow-up stories on the implications of what that means not just for schoolchildren, but for South Florida in a globally competitive information age? School Board members and state legislators can hide from confronting real issues, but The Miami Herald should not.
Another difficult budget issue readers deserved to know more about concerns withholding teacher raises and/or firing hundreds of teachers. What are the implications of Crew's whopping proposal of front-office cuts of 30 percent?
CRITICAL QUESTIONS
Board member Renier Díaz de la Portilla says in one story that Crew was responsible for ''a mistake classifying special-needs students that contributed to a $66 million overage in the 2007-08 budget.'' He says: ''I don't think taxpayers should continue to foot the bill for his incompetence and negligence.'' OK. But I as a reader want the impartial Herald to tell me what the truth is about this mysterious overage. Is this charge demagoguery, or did Crew make an egregious mistake?
The damage to Crew is done by leaving the charge standing and unchallenged.
Many letter writers and online comments say a Cuban-American vendetta is behind the attacks on Crew because of earlier alleged slights. Marquez persuasively reports in a column that the blame is exaggerated, and that Crew was at fault for not winning over those parts of the Cuban community opposed to him. Still, this sensitive issue and the role of Cuban talk radio deserved more reporting.
After Crew barely survived a vote last month on his tenure, reporter Matthew Pinzur brought some needed perspective to what at least Crew's weakened status means. Calling it a ''dark soap opera that has polarized the community and shoved educational issues off stage.'' Pinzur writes: ''The most vital question is whether the heady politics that produced Monday's 5-4 vote will color every future policy debate of Crew's tenure.'' It might be possible, others say, but Pinzur himself concludes: ``Navigating such narrow political waters can be exhaustingly time-consuming and require a level of compromise and tongue-biting that Crew has rarely shown.''
Now that is good analysis. Readers should have had more of that.
http://www.miamiherald.com
-Dr. Louie F. Rodriguez
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Miami Herald
Posted on Sun, Sep. 07, 2008
Inadequate coverage of Miami-Dade School Board-Rudy Crew saga
BY EDWARD SCHUMACHER-MATOS
No story is more important to you and me as readers of The Miami Herald than the state of our schools. In them lie not just the obvious future of our children, but the less obvious future of our local economy, our home values and our civic culture.
So the shocking fall of Miami-Dade schools superintendent Rudy Crew from being named National Superintendent of the Year by his peers to what even his backers say will be his likely firing or resignation would seem to be grist for crucial stories about just what is happening in the schools.
But those stories have gone missing. Since the saga devolved over the past 10 weeks from School Board grousing to racially tinged charges by Crew, who is African-American, of being ''lynched'' and ''treated like a dog,'' the coverage has been almost exclusively about political in-fighting, with mostly a ''he-said, she-said'' sort of false objectivity.
Manny Garcia, Senior Editor of News, said that The Herald has been planning for some time to do a more analytical step-back but that the daily rush of a fast-evolving story and the changes created by the recent staff cutbacks have interfered. The education editor took a recent buyout, and a new education editor, Heidi Carr, began last week.
''I don't want it to be an excuse,'' Garcia said. ``We have to deliver strong daily copy, but we need also to find the time to give the enterprise and context readers expect from us.''
As I write, an analytical story that Garcia says will ''look at benchmarks of how superintendents are normally measured across the country'' and examines the challenges that await the next superintendent is being prepared and will run elsewhere in the paper today. I have not seen the article, but I question whether even it will be enough.
[Editor's note: The article mentioned above, which was researched and reported over the past three weeks, appears today on Page 1A.]
The article also comes late. Some board members were up for reelection two weeks ago, which resulted in a balance of power shifting to Crew's critics. Whether better coverage would have changed the vote will never be known.
None of my criticism is meant to take sides. Crew often seems to be his own worst enemy. He has been strangely poor at board, media and community relations. His lapses have allowed critics to set the tone of the debate and make even mundane issues a referendum on his performance. This doesn't mean that The Miami Herald should allow itself to be played.
ISSUES THAT MATTER
Two real issues for readers, it seems to me, are whether Crew has been a good educator and a good manager.
On the first, the consensus seems to be that Crew has raised the educational quality of the schools. Yet, not one article over the past 10 weeks explored Crew's educational record. A review of the past six months finds several good features on individual schools and a wonderful back-to-school package. But there is little analytical coverage, and the one story that attempts this is a hatchet job. ''Zone initiative ineffective,'' said the June 27 headline about an internal report ''obtained'' by The Herald. The ''ineffectiveness'' concerned the first year of the new School Improvement Zone program. That year ended two years ago. The story offered almost nothing about the program's development since, making the report near worthless today.
Yet it was treated as a great revelation, critical of a signature Crew innovation. It even quoted Crew critic and board member Ana Rivas Logan saying of the entire program: ''According to this report, it was a total flop.'' I have no idea if the program today is a failure, but that was a dishonest quote about a report that dealt only with the first year. It never should have been allowed to stand alone, if even published.
Crew's management record in going over this and last year's budgets is the source of much criticism. This year's overrun, by my simple calculation from the confusing stories, is less than 1.5 percent. Is that major? Unprecedented? I don't know from The Herald's coverage, which never analyzes the budget.
I do know that news columnist Miriam Marquez was unfair when she blamed Crew for sloppiness because of an unjustified $10,000 moving expense by a school attorney. The executive in charge of a $5.5 billion budget should not be checking employee expense accounts.
One story by reporter Nirvi Shah at least gave an insightful measure by which to judge Crew. Shah compared the more-harmonious board and budget process in Broward County. There, new superintendent Jim Notter, according to Shah, is more solicitous of the board than Crew. He also began last year to make larger cutbacks in anticipation of state cuts.
The implications I derive from the coverage and reader letters is that Crew may have been more focused on pushing educational improvements, despite the new budget realities. ''We're at a crossroads here,'' board chairman Agustín Barrera says in a July 16 story by Kathleen McGrory that nicely lists a lot of the budget and political issues. ``We're being funded for basic education, and that's what we're going to have to provide.''
Wow. If that's true, where are the follow-up stories on the implications of what that means not just for schoolchildren, but for South Florida in a globally competitive information age? School Board members and state legislators can hide from confronting real issues, but The Miami Herald should not.
Another difficult budget issue readers deserved to know more about concerns withholding teacher raises and/or firing hundreds of teachers. What are the implications of Crew's whopping proposal of front-office cuts of 30 percent?
CRITICAL QUESTIONS
Board member Renier Díaz de la Portilla says in one story that Crew was responsible for ''a mistake classifying special-needs students that contributed to a $66 million overage in the 2007-08 budget.'' He says: ''I don't think taxpayers should continue to foot the bill for his incompetence and negligence.'' OK. But I as a reader want the impartial Herald to tell me what the truth is about this mysterious overage. Is this charge demagoguery, or did Crew make an egregious mistake?
The damage to Crew is done by leaving the charge standing and unchallenged.
Many letter writers and online comments say a Cuban-American vendetta is behind the attacks on Crew because of earlier alleged slights. Marquez persuasively reports in a column that the blame is exaggerated, and that Crew was at fault for not winning over those parts of the Cuban community opposed to him. Still, this sensitive issue and the role of Cuban talk radio deserved more reporting.
After Crew barely survived a vote last month on his tenure, reporter Matthew Pinzur brought some needed perspective to what at least Crew's weakened status means. Calling it a ''dark soap opera that has polarized the community and shoved educational issues off stage.'' Pinzur writes: ''The most vital question is whether the heady politics that produced Monday's 5-4 vote will color every future policy debate of Crew's tenure.'' It might be possible, others say, but Pinzur himself concludes: ``Navigating such narrow political waters can be exhaustingly time-consuming and require a level of compromise and tongue-biting that Crew has rarely shown.''
Now that is good analysis. Readers should have had more of that.
http://www.miamiherald.com
Friday, September 5, 2008
The final act in Crew drama is playing out (from Miami Herald)
With this on-going issue, I still wonder, To what extent has Dr. Crew been given the support and opportunity to excel in this city? Once again, we are talking about one of the most recognized superintendents in the country. I also wonder how the budget issue has become so politicized that any positive strides in the district can easily go unrecognized. --Dr. Louie F. Rodriguez
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Miami Herald
Posted on Fri, Sep. 05, 2008
The final act in Crew drama is playing out
MYRIAM MARQUEZ
The writing's on the blackboard. Rudy Crew's a goner.
The Dollar Principal's surprise election to the Miami-Dade School Board has become a symbol of voters' frustration with the superintendent's tin ear, thin skin and oversized ego. And it's a shame, really, because Crew has good ideas on education reform.
But he has been a not-so-good steward of the public's money.
Retired middle-school principal Larry Feldman's populist campaign, backed by more than $90,000 from the teachers' union, signals a mind change on a board that has consistently voted 5-4 to protect the superintendent. Feldman replaces a Crew backer.
On Thursday, the board agreed to hire Murray Greenberg, a retired attorney for Miami-Dade County government, to figure out grounds for dismissal in the superintendent's contract.
CHANGE OF HEART
Until recently, I argued it would be unfair to fire Crew because he has not been derelict in his duty. Then he decided that a meeting called to look into the almost $300 million hole in this year's budget wasn't worth attending.
Crew is ready to go -- with or without legal action. He's had four years of work in the nation's fourth-largest school district, about a year more than the average for big-city superintendents.
The problem has been Crew's refusal to be up front with board members when they have pressed for answers on the budget. He can't blame the governor or the Legislature for Miami-Dade schools' financial mess. Tallahassee, facing dwindling tax revenue in a tanking economy, cut about $74 million from the district's budget.
Where did the rest of the losses come from? The head spins.
In February, a state audit uncovered that the district paid $27.8 million in overtime during the last fiscal year and didn't bother to properly document the spending.
In April, we learned that district officials didn't bother to budget for a $36 million jump in healthcare benefits for teachers and other employees. Teachers balked at having their meager raises eaten up by insurance costs. So Crew gave in, but then he went after their salary increases pegged for this year.
It's been a drama ever since. And for good reason.
In June, the board learned, for the first time, that the district was ending the fiscal year $66 million in the red -- due, in part, to a $22 million gaffe in which the district missed out on state money by misclassifying special-needs students. Last week, Crew floated the outrageous idea of ending bilingual programs to cover losses if needed -- this in a district that's a national model in a city that bills itself a Gateway to the Americas.
And he hit the board with another surprise: The rainy-day fund, raided two years in a row, would be depleted by $22 million more. This leaves only $4.6 million, when a district this size should have at least $150 million on hand.
Budget officials say they have a plan to raise the fund to about
$32 million, but how can they be trusted to do so after so many screw-ups?
MISSING AGAIN
On Thursday, Crew again was missing in action. He snubbed the board's Innovation, Efficiency and Government Relations Committee, which was looking into how to plug that $300 million hole. And it's expected the district will face more than $200 million in losses next year.
Crew isn't responsible for a lousy economy, for rising food and gasoline costs that affect the budget or for dipping tax revenues. But he should be held accountable for lax oversight and misspending.
He has signaled he's ready to go. And on Monday, that could happen. Godspeed.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Miami Herald
Posted on Fri, Sep. 05, 2008
The final act in Crew drama is playing out
MYRIAM MARQUEZ
The writing's on the blackboard. Rudy Crew's a goner.
The Dollar Principal's surprise election to the Miami-Dade School Board has become a symbol of voters' frustration with the superintendent's tin ear, thin skin and oversized ego. And it's a shame, really, because Crew has good ideas on education reform.
But he has been a not-so-good steward of the public's money.
Retired middle-school principal Larry Feldman's populist campaign, backed by more than $90,000 from the teachers' union, signals a mind change on a board that has consistently voted 5-4 to protect the superintendent. Feldman replaces a Crew backer.
On Thursday, the board agreed to hire Murray Greenberg, a retired attorney for Miami-Dade County government, to figure out grounds for dismissal in the superintendent's contract.
CHANGE OF HEART
Until recently, I argued it would be unfair to fire Crew because he has not been derelict in his duty. Then he decided that a meeting called to look into the almost $300 million hole in this year's budget wasn't worth attending.
Crew is ready to go -- with or without legal action. He's had four years of work in the nation's fourth-largest school district, about a year more than the average for big-city superintendents.
The problem has been Crew's refusal to be up front with board members when they have pressed for answers on the budget. He can't blame the governor or the Legislature for Miami-Dade schools' financial mess. Tallahassee, facing dwindling tax revenue in a tanking economy, cut about $74 million from the district's budget.
Where did the rest of the losses come from? The head spins.
In February, a state audit uncovered that the district paid $27.8 million in overtime during the last fiscal year and didn't bother to properly document the spending.
In April, we learned that district officials didn't bother to budget for a $36 million jump in healthcare benefits for teachers and other employees. Teachers balked at having their meager raises eaten up by insurance costs. So Crew gave in, but then he went after their salary increases pegged for this year.
It's been a drama ever since. And for good reason.
In June, the board learned, for the first time, that the district was ending the fiscal year $66 million in the red -- due, in part, to a $22 million gaffe in which the district missed out on state money by misclassifying special-needs students. Last week, Crew floated the outrageous idea of ending bilingual programs to cover losses if needed -- this in a district that's a national model in a city that bills itself a Gateway to the Americas.
And he hit the board with another surprise: The rainy-day fund, raided two years in a row, would be depleted by $22 million more. This leaves only $4.6 million, when a district this size should have at least $150 million on hand.
Budget officials say they have a plan to raise the fund to about
$32 million, but how can they be trusted to do so after so many screw-ups?
MISSING AGAIN
On Thursday, Crew again was missing in action. He snubbed the board's Innovation, Efficiency and Government Relations Committee, which was looking into how to plug that $300 million hole. And it's expected the district will face more than $200 million in losses next year.
Crew isn't responsible for a lousy economy, for rising food and gasoline costs that affect the budget or for dipping tax revenues. But he should be held accountable for lax oversight and misspending.
He has signaled he's ready to go. And on Monday, that could happen. Godspeed.
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Losing Miami-Dade schools' TRUST program would set gay students adrift (from El Nuevo Herald)
Demonstrates the impact that budget cuts have on the lives of marginalized students. --Dr. Louie F. Rodriguez
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DANIEL SHOER ROTH VIEW FROM EL NUEVO HERALD
Losing Miami-Dade schools' TRUST program would set gay students adrift
Posted on Thu, Sep. 04, 2008
the_miami_herald:http://www.miamiherald.com/news/miami-dade/story/671211.html
By DANIEL SHOER ROTH
It no longer bothers him when they call him ''homo'' at school. Roberto Ramirez now holds his head proudly, running a hand across his long curly hair, smiles and replies curtly, ``Thanks a lot, I know who I am.''
Charismatic and delicate, Ramirez has a more pressing concern: a love not reciprocated.
''I am old-fashioned, a vintage lover; I like to be invited out and not to be pressured about sex,'' said the 18-year-old senior at Miami Southridge High. ``Unfortunately, that is not easy in the gay community.''
Ramirez confesses he has a platonic crush. The boy gives him hints of interest, but then disappears for months or admits he has a boyfriend.
Drowning in sorrow, Ramirez resorts to his school therapist, Susan Doucha. In the past two years she has helped him to ``feel good within my own skin.''
''When I leave her office I feel euphoric,'' said Ramirez.
The relationship between Ramirez and his therapist runs the risk of coming to an end next week, when the Miami-Dade County School Board will consider eliminating Project TRUST. Its 111 counselors provide intervention and daily assistance to victims of abuse and neglect. For many students who are sexual minorities, this is the only support they can get.
It's become clear that the emotional health of our students is not a priority even though gays have the highest suicide rate among teenagers. First went the psychologists, who had months of work cut back in Miami-Dade schools, and now the therapists.
For Ramirez, the road to acceptance has been rocky, ever since showing up in elementary school with Hello Kitty supplies. In fourth grade, he gave a chain to a friend, but the boy's mother threatened to sue the school and Ramirez's mother. For years, he felt there was something wrong with him. In middle school, he isolated himself completely. In high school, he came out of the closet.
Since there are several gay and lesbian kids attending Southridge, Doucha divided them into groups named after rainbow colors. In the sessions they talk about self-esteem, love, drugs and prevention of sexually transmitted diseases.
Ramirez prefers to share his intimate stories individually. ``I look for her whenever I have difficulties understanding my relationships.''
He has also had problems finding a job close to his home in West Kendall, where he lives with parents who accept him. He is lucky because 50 percent of gay teens are rejected by their parents when they find out their orientation.
To stave off depression, he locks himself in the garage, turns up the stereo and dances to Britney Spears. He also collects perfumes (20), body sprays (42) and lotions (12).
Lately, Ramirez has become interested in psychology, his favorite subject, which he hopes to study after graduating. ''I find the mind so fascinating and I love to listen to people,'' he says.
The same way the school therapist has listened, helping him to value himself regardless of the acceptance or love of others. It has been difficult, because he is determined to find happiness with a partner who will value him for more than this looks, someone he can buy gifts for.
''I want to be a psychologist and a supermodel so I can be on the cover of Vogue and Vanity Fair,'' dreams Ramirez. ``When I retire, I want to own a bed and breakfast, hopefully with someone by my side.''
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DANIEL SHOER ROTH VIEW FROM EL NUEVO HERALD
Losing Miami-Dade schools' TRUST program would set gay students adrift
Posted on Thu, Sep. 04, 2008
the_miami_herald:http://www.miamiherald.com/news/miami-dade/story/671211.html
By DANIEL SHOER ROTH
It no longer bothers him when they call him ''homo'' at school. Roberto Ramirez now holds his head proudly, running a hand across his long curly hair, smiles and replies curtly, ``Thanks a lot, I know who I am.''
Charismatic and delicate, Ramirez has a more pressing concern: a love not reciprocated.
''I am old-fashioned, a vintage lover; I like to be invited out and not to be pressured about sex,'' said the 18-year-old senior at Miami Southridge High. ``Unfortunately, that is not easy in the gay community.''
Ramirez confesses he has a platonic crush. The boy gives him hints of interest, but then disappears for months or admits he has a boyfriend.
Drowning in sorrow, Ramirez resorts to his school therapist, Susan Doucha. In the past two years she has helped him to ``feel good within my own skin.''
''When I leave her office I feel euphoric,'' said Ramirez.
The relationship between Ramirez and his therapist runs the risk of coming to an end next week, when the Miami-Dade County School Board will consider eliminating Project TRUST. Its 111 counselors provide intervention and daily assistance to victims of abuse and neglect. For many students who are sexual minorities, this is the only support they can get.
It's become clear that the emotional health of our students is not a priority even though gays have the highest suicide rate among teenagers. First went the psychologists, who had months of work cut back in Miami-Dade schools, and now the therapists.
For Ramirez, the road to acceptance has been rocky, ever since showing up in elementary school with Hello Kitty supplies. In fourth grade, he gave a chain to a friend, but the boy's mother threatened to sue the school and Ramirez's mother. For years, he felt there was something wrong with him. In middle school, he isolated himself completely. In high school, he came out of the closet.
Since there are several gay and lesbian kids attending Southridge, Doucha divided them into groups named after rainbow colors. In the sessions they talk about self-esteem, love, drugs and prevention of sexually transmitted diseases.
Ramirez prefers to share his intimate stories individually. ``I look for her whenever I have difficulties understanding my relationships.''
He has also had problems finding a job close to his home in West Kendall, where he lives with parents who accept him. He is lucky because 50 percent of gay teens are rejected by their parents when they find out their orientation.
To stave off depression, he locks himself in the garage, turns up the stereo and dances to Britney Spears. He also collects perfumes (20), body sprays (42) and lotions (12).
Lately, Ramirez has become interested in psychology, his favorite subject, which he hopes to study after graduating. ''I find the mind so fascinating and I love to listen to people,'' he says.
The same way the school therapist has listened, helping him to value himself regardless of the acceptance or love of others. It has been difficult, because he is determined to find happiness with a partner who will value him for more than this looks, someone he can buy gifts for.
''I want to be a psychologist and a supermodel so I can be on the cover of Vogue and Vanity Fair,'' dreams Ramirez. ``When I retire, I want to own a bed and breakfast, hopefully with someone by my side.''
High court axes 3 key amendments (from Miami Herald)
Refer to a previous post about the concept of neo-vouchers. I wonder if the decision in the article below influences this new era of vouchers. -Dr. Louie F.Rodriguez
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FLORIDA SUPREME COURT
High court axes 3 key amendments
The Florida Supreme Court removed three high-profile constitutional amendments from the November ballot, including one calling for a tax-swap plan.
Posted on Thu, Sep. 04, 2008
BY MARY ELLEN KLAS
meklas@MiamiHerald.com
TALLAHASSEE -- The Florida Supreme Court dealt a blow to a tax revision plan and school vouchers Wednesday, removing from the November ballot three controversial amendments that could have dramatically altered the future of Florida.
In unanimous rulings delivered less than five hours after the court heard oral arguments, the justices rejected Amendments 5, 7 and 9 on grounds they were improperly placed on the November ballot and are misleading to voters.
The amendments were placed directly on the ballot by the Taxation and Budget Reform Commission, a citizens' panel that meets once every 20 years.
Allan Bense, the chairman of the Taxation and Budget Reform Commission, said he hopes a citizens' group will pursue tax reform now that the commission's signature issue has been killed.
''We gave it our best shot,'' he said. ``I thought that was Florida's best chance ever for real tax reform.''
Amendment 5 -- known as the tax-swap amendment -- would have eliminated property taxes that pay for schools, lowering average tax bills by 25 percent and forcing legislators to replace the money with sales and other taxes.
Amendment 7 would have repealed the 100-year-old ban on direct state funding of religious institutions, including religious schools.
And Amendment 9 would have overturned the state Supreme Court decision that invalidated state-paid vouchers for students in failing public schools to attend private schools.
Opponents argued that the amendments were flawed and that voters would be hoodwinked into supporting them for the wrong reasons.
The swift ruling, to be followed later by a written opinion, gives the secretary of state time to remove the proposals from the official ballot by the Friday deadline.
The big winners are the state's teachers union and school boards, which feared the property tax and voucher amendments would erode state education spending and dilute the Legislature's desire to fix public schools.
Broward Teachers Union President Pat Santeramo said he was ''ecstatic'' about the decision: ``Public education will be saved.''
The unions and school boards, along with a coalition of business, healthcare, education and other interest groups, argued that Amendment 5's ballot language was misleading because it implied that schools would be protected indefinitely from budget cuts when in fact the amendment says the Legislature must protect school spending only the year the amendment would take effect -- 2010-11.
''In rejecting the measures, the court backed clear, unambiguous constitutional amendments, not proposals that mask their true meaning,'' said Florida Education Association President Andy Ford.
But Gov. Charlie Crist was ''disappointed the people will not have the opportunity to vote to lower their property taxes,'' said Erin Isaac, Crist's communication's chief.
And former Gov. Jeb Bush, who made private school vouchers a major component of his education reforms, called the ruling ''extremely disappointing'' and said he feared for the fate of other voucher programs that have not faced a legal challenge.
''Now, more than ever, Floridians should have a voice in determining -- not just how much they are taxed -- but how their tax dollars are spent,'' Bush said.
The court ruling followed an animated one-hour session Wednesday morning, in which the justices questioned whether the tax commission exceeded its authority when it voted to place the voucher amendments before voters and whether Amendment 5 was misleading.
Leon County Circuit Court Judge John Cooper first ruled Amendment 5 unconstitutional because of that misleading implication. Wednesday, the high court agreed. Several justices reiterated his reasoning that the title and summary could confuse voters.
'The average person is going to read this and say, `OK, those property taxes are gone, but the state is going to put that same amount of money back into the school system -- I don't have anything to worry about,' '' said Chief Justice Peggy Quince. ``What will put them on notice . . . that this isn't a feature of it?''
Mark Herron, the attorney representing the Florida Association of Realtors and other proponents, argued that the amendment ''doesn't imply or infer'' that the money will be replaced beyond the first year.
Justice Charles Wells disagreed. ''Unfortunately, like I find with some warranties, it's not a lifetime warranty and I don't have any recourse,'' he said.
The chief architect of the proposal, tax commission member John McKay, said Wednesday the proposal was drafted by some of Florida's best legal scholars who know the Legislature rewrites the school budget every year. They decided that specifying that school budgets would be immune from cuts after the first year was not necessary, adding, ``in hindsight, that would have probably been a good idea.''
The high court also agreed with opponents that the Taxation and Budget Reform Commission went beyond its authority when it placed the voucher-related amendments on the ballot. Justice Harry Lee Anstead questioned whether the commission was created to deal with any issue that has budget impact, or if it's limited to those that deal with the budget process. If not, he said, ``they could do anything.''
Bense said the process exposed some problems with the design of the commission, too. The Constitution requires the panel to get 17 of 25 members to place any amendment on the ballot, so proponents were forced to compromise and revise their proposals to get enough votes.
In the end, that may have doomed these three proposals, Bense said. For example, the tax reform amendment was tied to eliminating property taxes to win enough votes to put it on the ballot, but that prompted schools to worry about funding cuts.
''Had it required a majority vote, maybe it would be on the ballot,'' he said.
Miami Herald staff writer Hannah Sampson contributed to this report.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FLORIDA SUPREME COURT
High court axes 3 key amendments
The Florida Supreme Court removed three high-profile constitutional amendments from the November ballot, including one calling for a tax-swap plan.
Posted on Thu, Sep. 04, 2008
BY MARY ELLEN KLAS
meklas@MiamiHerald.com
TALLAHASSEE -- The Florida Supreme Court dealt a blow to a tax revision plan and school vouchers Wednesday, removing from the November ballot three controversial amendments that could have dramatically altered the future of Florida.
In unanimous rulings delivered less than five hours after the court heard oral arguments, the justices rejected Amendments 5, 7 and 9 on grounds they were improperly placed on the November ballot and are misleading to voters.
The amendments were placed directly on the ballot by the Taxation and Budget Reform Commission, a citizens' panel that meets once every 20 years.
Allan Bense, the chairman of the Taxation and Budget Reform Commission, said he hopes a citizens' group will pursue tax reform now that the commission's signature issue has been killed.
''We gave it our best shot,'' he said. ``I thought that was Florida's best chance ever for real tax reform.''
Amendment 5 -- known as the tax-swap amendment -- would have eliminated property taxes that pay for schools, lowering average tax bills by 25 percent and forcing legislators to replace the money with sales and other taxes.
Amendment 7 would have repealed the 100-year-old ban on direct state funding of religious institutions, including religious schools.
And Amendment 9 would have overturned the state Supreme Court decision that invalidated state-paid vouchers for students in failing public schools to attend private schools.
Opponents argued that the amendments were flawed and that voters would be hoodwinked into supporting them for the wrong reasons.
The swift ruling, to be followed later by a written opinion, gives the secretary of state time to remove the proposals from the official ballot by the Friday deadline.
The big winners are the state's teachers union and school boards, which feared the property tax and voucher amendments would erode state education spending and dilute the Legislature's desire to fix public schools.
Broward Teachers Union President Pat Santeramo said he was ''ecstatic'' about the decision: ``Public education will be saved.''
The unions and school boards, along with a coalition of business, healthcare, education and other interest groups, argued that Amendment 5's ballot language was misleading because it implied that schools would be protected indefinitely from budget cuts when in fact the amendment says the Legislature must protect school spending only the year the amendment would take effect -- 2010-11.
''In rejecting the measures, the court backed clear, unambiguous constitutional amendments, not proposals that mask their true meaning,'' said Florida Education Association President Andy Ford.
But Gov. Charlie Crist was ''disappointed the people will not have the opportunity to vote to lower their property taxes,'' said Erin Isaac, Crist's communication's chief.
And former Gov. Jeb Bush, who made private school vouchers a major component of his education reforms, called the ruling ''extremely disappointing'' and said he feared for the fate of other voucher programs that have not faced a legal challenge.
''Now, more than ever, Floridians should have a voice in determining -- not just how much they are taxed -- but how their tax dollars are spent,'' Bush said.
The court ruling followed an animated one-hour session Wednesday morning, in which the justices questioned whether the tax commission exceeded its authority when it voted to place the voucher amendments before voters and whether Amendment 5 was misleading.
Leon County Circuit Court Judge John Cooper first ruled Amendment 5 unconstitutional because of that misleading implication. Wednesday, the high court agreed. Several justices reiterated his reasoning that the title and summary could confuse voters.
'The average person is going to read this and say, `OK, those property taxes are gone, but the state is going to put that same amount of money back into the school system -- I don't have anything to worry about,' '' said Chief Justice Peggy Quince. ``What will put them on notice . . . that this isn't a feature of it?''
Mark Herron, the attorney representing the Florida Association of Realtors and other proponents, argued that the amendment ''doesn't imply or infer'' that the money will be replaced beyond the first year.
Justice Charles Wells disagreed. ''Unfortunately, like I find with some warranties, it's not a lifetime warranty and I don't have any recourse,'' he said.
The chief architect of the proposal, tax commission member John McKay, said Wednesday the proposal was drafted by some of Florida's best legal scholars who know the Legislature rewrites the school budget every year. They decided that specifying that school budgets would be immune from cuts after the first year was not necessary, adding, ``in hindsight, that would have probably been a good idea.''
The high court also agreed with opponents that the Taxation and Budget Reform Commission went beyond its authority when it placed the voucher-related amendments on the ballot. Justice Harry Lee Anstead questioned whether the commission was created to deal with any issue that has budget impact, or if it's limited to those that deal with the budget process. If not, he said, ``they could do anything.''
Bense said the process exposed some problems with the design of the commission, too. The Constitution requires the panel to get 17 of 25 members to place any amendment on the ballot, so proponents were forced to compromise and revise their proposals to get enough votes.
In the end, that may have doomed these three proposals, Bense said. For example, the tax reform amendment was tied to eliminating property taxes to win enough votes to put it on the ballot, but that prompted schools to worry about funding cuts.
''Had it required a majority vote, maybe it would be on the ballot,'' he said.
Miami Herald staff writer Hannah Sampson contributed to this report.
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